If you have their IP addresses in your dashboard, go to Google Ads > Admin > Account Settings > IP Exclusions. Then, add the entire network/data center range there (i.e. 123.4.5.*). In 99% of cases, these bot networks are not run from residential providers. You can confirm IPs at https://ipgeolocation.io/
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
This is one of the primary reasons why fraud actors purchase residential proxies in bulk now. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of a huge grey/black market iceberg.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
What is the incentive for the bot owners? Why do the bots download and install the apps? It has some (very small) cost to them, and I don't understand the value for them.
The bot owner is also providing "ad space" to Google. Author pays Google to show the ad. Bot owner gets paid by Google to "display" that ad and for conversion. The bot themselves aren't getting paid for installing the application.
In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.
I'm trying to confirm that I understand what you mean:
Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.
Surprisingly, no. 29 of the 30 zero-time installs had no click at all; Google credited them to someone watching the video. The install isn't what gets the farm paid. It's what makes Google's bidding think that placement is working, so it sends it more of your ads.
This was my thought too. It's easy to pretend to click one ad in order to make that ad money. But it's also easy for Google to tell apart a huge number of accounts where they all clicked that one ad and no others. However, if a huge number of accounts simply click a whole load of ads there's basically no way to tell that it was targeted at any particular ad + they can bot for multiple ads at once.
this is unfortunately very common - I kept running very small ads regularly over many years (~10 years by now) and the % of bots has been steadily increasing, and Google doesn't really have any system to report those reliably to them. In fact, it's contrary to their incentives to investigate & fix these problems - unless they feel some pressure from competition...
From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.
And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
Digital marketing is a solved problem. You pay a commission on verified real sales to affiliates, and they can do what the hell they please to make those sales. If somebody like Google or Meta cannot promise X amount of sales for Y amount of ad money spent, then you are a fool to give them any money. They have all the algorithms and profiles on everybody, so it's their job to match your product to customers. Why should you have to tweak who will be targeted?
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.
After running Google Ads for a couple of years, our current exclusion list has over 4000 networks just in the US.
You know all those trojan infected smart TVs and home routers and such? That's one of the things they're doing.
And the pay for these things is "access to 500+ TB Jellyfin-like movie services for free"
Of course, it's all pirated out of country. And the pay is being a residential proxy.
And piracy being the only way to actually own, I'm not imaging this will stop anytime soon.
They get paid for adverts to bots don’t they? Unrelated?
In a normal scenario, the provider of ad space would be a website or an application. Google would pay the owner of that space. On Youtube, that would be an ad served by Google paid to the channel owner.
Bot farm is operated by a company that displays Google ads. This bot farm fakes traffic to the bot farm owner and simulates conversion Google wants to see. Google sees the high conversion and happily serves more ads to the bot farm owner. Bot farm owner is paid by Google for displaying the ads. The person paying for the ad gets screwed.
From time to time, Google ads sales reps call me and are trying to convince me to increase the ads spend. I complain about bots, and none of them had any suggestion on what I can do to appeal it etc. I mean I can appeal on some specific instance, once - but there's no process to communicate back to Google the cases where I'm 99% certain about bots on regular basis.
And these bots get increasingly more sophisticated. They used to just click on ads. Then they started installing the app. Then running the app once and do nothing in it. Then they started tapping on the app screen & actually try to go through some initial app steps. When they do it in a spiky way, it's easy to detect them. But when they do it through some distributed device farms, below noise, it's very hard.
Search for "datadog" and the first result is a sponsored link for Datadog. I click that and datadog had to pay google. scroll a bit down and there's the "real" natural link.
Fugazi!
Well, the answer is that many people owe their paycheck to not letting their employers or shareholders know that digital marketing is a solved problem.
Good luck on that. I have sympathy for OP, but running ads is really hard. It's why most people set targets for things that happen in the app (OP updated to a target of winning a game, not just installing), and why companies have entire teams dedicated to monitoring Google/Meta/X ads. Trial runs are often thousands of dollars, and it's easy to evaporate money. I've made the same mistakes, and its why y-combinator strongly recommends against running online ads, especially in the beginning.