Excuse my ignorance, I know nothing about running these ads.

How does a bot know whether you've optimized for download volume or in-app actions? I don't understand how a bot would know to download the app to fulfill your requirement?

Furthermore, what is the incentive to write and operate these bots? Genuinely curious. The only party with an incentive to do this would be Google, no?

App owners who make money off serving ads are incentivized to do this (and have frequently been caught doing this).

If anyone's interested, the term is called click fraud - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_fraud

A FTP game can do a TON to encourage people to download apps that'll never be opened without committing clickfraud.

Gosh I'm old. Spent a while there trying to figure out how File Transfer Protocol could be relevant to clickfraud.

Ah, me too. For those still confused, "Free To Play"

Well, don't feel bad. I did the exact same thing, except I had the benefit of your post and its anscestor replies, so I wasted less time.

You don't have to be old -- we still use FTP all the time at my job. Of course, whenever we have a say we use some secure variant, but you don't always have a say (no matter how much you yell, grumble, sermonize about the dangers of insecure tech, etc).

Of course, you probably meant you feel old because "FTP" didn't immediately register to you as "Free To Play". Well, I can't help you there, because by that standard I guess I'm pretty old too.

:-D

I usually see it written F2P for free to play, which cuts down on ambiguity.

I thought the same. An FTP game? What have I been missing.

The correct acronym is F2P, not FTP for „free to play“

Please, let's bring back sharewares instead of this mess. Unplausible, I guess. Impossible, I'll hear. Whatever.

The bot doesn't know, but the ad platform is optimizing for similar traffic.

So if bots are more likely to click download, and bots have similarities, bots see more ads.

I was thinking the same thing, only google has an incentive to do this and it would be too risky for them, legally and to their reputation. Either this isn't happening as much as people think it is, or some third party has an unknown reason to be operating bots like this.

Another guess at a third party reason: bots adding noise to their behaviour. "If I go clicking on everything, it'll be harder to know what my actual target was."

Competitors have a strong incentive to click each other's ads.

Google has a strong incentive to let them.

That's false. The one area where I'm sure google doesn't mess around is with their ads division. They spend a proportionately large amount of money combating fraud to prevent erosion of confidence and most importantly accuracy in their main money maker.

If you've ever taken a look at the number of conversions fb ads provides vs google ads, you'd know this.

Agreed, especially where most of these clicks can be carefully audited and reconciled by the advertiser, it would make no sense for Google to threaten its reputation and primary money maker.

Edit: that being said, this does not seem to hold for Facebook, and I don't have a good reason why.

Google has a stronger incentive to not let them.

Google's advertising business is built on trust. The moment there are a few scandals involving fake/robot ad clicks, big advertisers will remove their ad campaigns.

Google is the only organization with the data to show this happening at scale and they don’t have incentive to connect all the one-off anecdotes.

So while it is risky, not sure how they could be caught. I don’t think they are running click fraud bots, but it’s hard to quantify how hard they work to stop them.

A friend of mine estimated that 1/3 of ad spend is click fraud but it’s just in the wash because it’s hard to stop.

> Can rack up thousands of downloads for <10 cents per download without any impact on how many users actually use or rate

I'm assuming you use display for this pricing? If so build a white list of acceptable sites or avoid display. Running open network is always waste of cash in y experience, especially mobile devices.