MARKETINGGoogle Ads Fake Traffic: What’s the Real Truth?Google Ads will send you fake traffic if you are not careful, especially through App Promotion Campaigns. Don't spend heavily on Google Ads without running small and manual experiments first. Google Ads is the go-to platform for startups looking to get their product (whether it’s an app, website, or both) into the hands of their customers. But the challenge lies in finding the right customers, and for most startups, Google Ads is the best option.It comes with a wide array of settings. All you have to do is fine-tune the settings, create provocative and catchy assets, and voila! You have the perfect customer.But, is it that easy and efficient?It depends, really. If you don’t care about getting fake traffic, then yes, go for it. But if you do, read the blog first before making a financial decision.

So, Do Google Ads Deliberately Send Fake Traffic?

It all started back in April 2024. We were seeing a strong engagement on Kaffein, and things were looking pretty good. However, we wanted to further optimize the onboarding experience - Yes, the curse of chasing perfection. But then came August 2024, and things took a turn for the worst. Out of nowhere the drop in account creation suddenly became massive. Nothing had changed on our end, but we were not gaining any new users.Like many startups, we began to analyze every aspect of the onboarding process. We added metrics everywhere, made account creation more flexible, and tried every other tweak—but nothing improved. So, we decided to take some drastic steps: Here’s what happened: According to Google, we received 50 conversions. Not bad, considering this was a new account and a new ad campaign. It didn’t get the required time to optimize further. But here’s the crazy part. Out of those 50 people, only 50% had opened the app and the rest didn’t even open it. And Of those 50%, a mere 25% had created an account. But wait, it gets even crazier. As you can see from the above figure, from 13 to 18, only 1 day saw an engagement time of around 10 minutes, and the rest were all 0.Mind you, at this time, We had a flexible Create Account experience. All there was was a single “Enter” button - No actual sign-up was required, at all.So of all the people downloading the app, they aren’t even interested in opening the app, and people who are opening, they aren’t even curious to click on the SINGLE button that was displayed. At this moment, all customer psychology knowledge had gone to take a coffee break.So, we paused our App Promotion Campaigns and launched a Website Traffic Campaign instead. The results? Exactly the same. We even promoted our YouTube video linking to the website.

But the behavior remained the same!

After further investigations, we found out that we are not alone.Don’t make the same mistakes as us. Here are a few key takeaways that can help you improve your Google Ads results: For App Promotion Campaigns, Google doesn’t let you turn off the Display Network. As seen in our case, app campaigns often push ads there, resulting in more fake traffic. Final Thoughts:While we don’t know when Google will resolve this issue, till they do, we recommend running small experiments before committing significant budgets to paid advertising using Google.