Last week I wrote about spending $220 on Google app ads and finding out 60% of the installs were robots. I sent Google the evidence and promised to report back on the refund. Google has answered, and to understand why I feel like I’m going crazy, you probably need the other half of my Google Ad(Mob) experience.
We show ads in Dayzle through Google AdMob. A few days after our soft launch, Google suspended the account for “self-clicking”: a month with no ads, no explanation of which clicks, and no appeal.
So I went looking. Our entire AdMob history was 255 ads shown and 15 clicks, every one of them on an iPhone or iPad in Canada. It turns out that on certain iOS devices, Google’s full-screen ads show no close button, whatever the ad is. If you can’t close an ad, you tap the screen, and tapping the screen clicks the ad. On one friend’s iPhone 12, that happened with every full-screen ad they saw. On another friend’s iPad, the ads never showed a close button either, and sometimes froze the whole device, so the only way out was to restart it. I only know about those two because I know them personally.
That means at least two devices had a 100% click-through rate: every ad they were shown got clicked. I understand why that looks suspicious. It looks exactly like me sitting in my basement, clicking my own ads to make a few pennies. By my count, somewhere between 5 and 15 of our 15 clicks came from this bug.
Total earnings before the suspension, from real ads shown to real people: $3.77. Canadian, so less than $2.75 in freedom dollars.
I contacted Google’s ad support, and they took it seriously. They confirmed the missing close button was a known issue and gave it an internal bug number. Then they asked me to help them debug it, by recording the app’s network traffic while the bug happens.
Google, a company with a market cap of about $4.2 trillion at the time of writing and about 200,000 employees, needed my help. One of the largest companies in the world, with a bug in one of its biggest ad platforms, asked a guy who makes puzzle games to help track it down. What reality are we living in? Is this the darkest timeline?
Still, I was happy to help, except my account was suspended, so there was no ad to record. I told them I could help as soon as they turned my ads back on. Support suggested I appeal the suspension. I asked how. They sent me a form. The team behind that form wrote back to say it couldn’t help. Then support told me that form was only for disabled accounts, mine was merely suspended, so I should try a different form. So I filled out the “right” form, and I’m still waiting to hear back. I’m not optimistic I’ll hear anything before the suspension ends on its own. To their credit, support also tried to escalate the case, but that was about a week ago, and I haven’t heard anything from that either. Meanwhile, the bug remains until my suspension ends, and my suspension was caused by the bug.
Here’s the strange part: I came away reassured. If Google will suspend an account over a handful of clicks that its own bug caused, it must take fraud very seriously, so my ad spend was probably safe. And surely if I pointed out evidence of actual fraud for them - they’d do something about it.
Then the answer on the bot farm arrived. I’d sent Google the countries the installs came from, including three the campaign didn’t target, and a table of what every install did in the app. 33 of the 56 installs I paid for opened the app once, spent zero seconds on any screen and never came back. On the busiest day, 20 of them were running a version of our app the Play Store had stopped offering days earlier. Those 33 are the ones I can call bots beyond a reasonable doubt. That doesn’t make the other 23 real: only 13 of the 56 behaved like people who actually played. Google reviewed all of that and found no evidence of invalid traffic. The activity, it said, “appear[s] to fit a pattern of normal user behavior.”
So Google can find a handful of accidental clicks from two of my friends’ devices, and it can’t find 33 phones running a version of our app its own store wasn’t offering anymore, some of them installed on a different continent from the one my ads were targeting.
My best guess is that it comes down to clicks. Google has been catching bad clicks for twenty years, and it’s very good at it. The bot farm barely clicked: 29 of the 30 installs that spent zero time in the app had no click at all. Google credited each one to someone watching a video ad, and the app was installed from a saved copy of the file. If the review mostly looks at clicks, it finds nothing wrong with my account, which is what it reported. I can’t prove that’s what happened, but it’s the only explanation I have that fits both answers. I guess they have much less practice at detecting install fraud, and are therefore less sophisticated at it.
This is a small example of what’s probably happening with scams everywhere. As detection gets better, fraud has to stay a step ahead of it to keep paying. Here, the farm moved away from clicks entirely, into a part of Google Ads that’s less well policed. You can see the same thing elsewhere: phone scams have moved on to deepfaked voices. And in both cases, phone scams and install fraud, if the big platforms can’t keep up, then the job of protecting yourself lands on the little guy.
To anyone at Google reading this: this isn’t a declaration of war. You win. I’m venting because the situation is a little crazy, and I’m honestly not sure how many real humans have read my emails so far. I guess I just need to figure out how to live within the rules of this new reality.
I’ve replied to Google with specific questions and asked for the case to go to someone who reviews app installs. I’ll report back on what they say. Fingers crossed I get a real person who can help me.