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.
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...
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.
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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.
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...
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.