Q: Our conversions looked great but the advertiser found a device farm — how was it spotted?

Q: Our conversions looked great but the advertiser found a device farm — how was it spotted?

A: A device farm is a rack of real (or emulated) phones used to fake human-looking activity. It can fool basic checks because the traffic comes from genuine devices. One affiliate got flagged for this without knowing a sub-source was using one.

The advertiser shared the signature that gave it away in their 23% of flagged conversions:
— Hundreds of devices all running the exact same OS build and screen resolution
— All on the same narrow battery range (devices charged together on a rack)
— Touch events with identical, mechanical timing — no natural human jitter
— Sensor data (gyroscope, accelerometer) flat or absent

No single signal proves a farm; the combination does. The affiliate cut the source, and the advertiser shared which signals to monitor.

Result: after dropping that one sub-source, flagged conversions fell from 23% to 3%, and the affiliate added device-diversity checks to their own pre-send screening.

Short version: device farms betray themselves through uniformity — identical builds, synced battery levels, and robotic touch timing across many 'users'.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.