
Running Dropbox affiliate ads cost me my Adwords account - gravitronic
http://gravitronic.blogspot.com/2012/02/running-dropbox-referral-ads-got-me.html
======
powertower
Google AdWords will permanently ban you for anything, and you will have no
recourse, nor will any opportunity be provided to you to fix/correct the
issue.

Someone lives next door to you, that gets their account banned? Your account
gets banned.

You move into an apartment that had a previous resident 6 years ago, whose
account got banned 2 years ago? Your account gets banned.

CTR too low on some test you are running? Your account gets banned.

Ad does not pass review and you forget and try it again in 3 months? Your
account gets banned.

One day you are going to log in and see this message...

<http://www.devside.net/images/adwords-account-suspended.png>

You're only option will be to make as much noise as you can about it, until
someone at Google sees it on HN.

For the rest of us, we get screwed.

On a side note, Google cares so much about the communication between the
client and the AdWords team, that email coming from AdWords often makes it
right into the Gmail spam folder (100% in my case). They don't even bother
white-listing it! That's where I found the reply for my plea for un-
suspension.

~~~
adamrmcd
Were you able to convince Google to un-suspend you?

I used to use AdWords on my own site, and my account was frozen because of
"click-fraud". A few enterprising users on an unrelated forum decided to click
my ads repeatedly, to support my OSS project. As a result I was denied the $10
of "legitimate clicks"

Any attempt to launch an appeal and contact Google seemed like the message was
sent to _their_ spam folder, and ignored.

~~~
bks
This seems like an AdSense vs. Adwords issue. What the forum users were doing
was defrauding Adwords advertisers in an attempt to bolster your AdSense
account.

Essentially committing fraud. The issue in this post is his AdWords account
was banned because of x,y,z reason but not because of to many clicks. They
probably saw the $100 credit beding used for affiliate direct linking and
flagged the account.

Just as an aside I have 13GB on dropbox now and got the additional storage by
using the technique outlined in the article. My biggest difference was that
the account was seasoned and I was spending my own money, not google coupon
money.

~~~
adamrmcd
Thanks for clarifying :) I was actually under the impression that AdSence was
AdWords renamed. My issue happened in 2008 after all, I'm still suspended
today.

Anyway, I agree that these users were committing fraud, but why ban me? I
didn't condone (or even know) what they were doing until after the fact. The
correct thing for AdSence to do here is to identify the offending IP
addresses, cancel the _credit accumulated_ by said IPs, and let me continue
supporting the program on my site.

~~~
dangrossman
> Anyway, I agree that these users were committing fraud, but why ban me?

Because, explicitly or implicitly, something you were doing was encouraging
people to defraud advertisers through your website. The way to stop this is to
eliminate the cause (the person/site encouraging the fraud) not the symptom
(today's batch of site visitors). Multiple people don't start engaging in
multi-day click fraud behavior randomly -- something sets it off, something as
innocuous as a forum post encouraging it or text near the ad that says "this
project supported by ad clicks" -- but there has to be a catalyst, and that's
the thing they're putting an end to by suspending an account.

~~~
jacquesm
> Because, explicitly or implicitly, something you were doing was encouraging
> people to defraud advertisers through your website.

That's a pretty bad thing to say about someone without any proof whatsoever.
If users decide to 'help' you that does not automatically mean that you
'explicitly or implicitly' encouraged them to do so. People will do the
strangest things without any prompting.

Technically this exposes a weakness in Google's program, after all any
competitor could do this to you resulting in the banning of your account.

------
krelian
I'll use this to briefly add my own AdWords horror story.

I decided on whim to try AdWords for a couple of clickbank products.
Apparently one of them was against the TOS though I was not aware of it at the
time. I haven't read the TOS but since both of my ads where approved I figured
everything was OK. I run these two ads for _4 hours_ and shut them down. One
of the ads got maybe 2 clicks and couple of dozen impressions, the second ad
had no impressions and no clicks. I paused the campaign after 4 hours. _A year
and a half later_ I receive an email from Adwords notifying me that my account
has been suspended for running ads against the TOS.

Talking to support was like talking to a brick wall.

I am fairly certain that the only reason I got banned was because I left these
ads on pause and didn't actually delete them. They probably run a scan at some
point looking for ads that infringe the TOS and picked me up. It's entirely
possible that these ads weren't against the TOS at the time I set up the
campaign but well, it's Google so there is no one to talk to.

I didn't need to use AdWords since but I probably will at some point so it
certainly sucks for me.

~~~
forcer
We are an active Adwords advertiser with huge budgets for last 5 years. Our
account got suspended last month for an ad that was created 4 years ago and
was running for few weeks then we deleted it (yes, the ad was deleted for 4
years). What happened is that the domain we were advertising expired and it
was serving 404. We were talking for about 1 month with Google reps that it
was 4 years ago, the ad has been deleted, website is not even registered any
more. Exactly as you are saying - brick wall. As a last chance out of
desperation, I decided to register that domain (luckily it was available),
then I put a text on it crafted as an apology to Adwords with a link back to
google search results for people landing on this site. In few days our account
was reinstated... Go figure...only moral of the story is that nothing with
Adwords makes sense... you just have to do what they ask you and shut up :)

~~~
josephb
Thanks for this clue. I've been bashing my head trying to work out why my
adwords account recently got suspended.

I haven't used it in 4 years, however one of the domains I was advertising is
still mine, but just goes to an error page now. Will check this out!

------
ricg
My Adwords account got suspended as well without a proper explanation as to
why a few years ago.

After contacting Adwords support I received this response:

"Our support team is unable to provide any further information. Please do not
contact us again."

I ran a campaign for a website for medical school students. Absolutely
harmless and as far as I can tell in full compliance with the ToS! I can only
assume that whoever checked/scanned the ad assumed I must be advertising
medical items (which I was not).

~~~
moe
_Please do not contact us again._

Tell us how you really feel about your users, google...

------
robomartin
The way Google deals with AdWords and AdSense, shall we say, quality
evaluation and banning is broken. The process looks totalitarian and brutal on
the receiving end. The potential to get banned forever isn't conducive to
learning and is simply too risky to even consider as a source of income. I for
one insists that people ignore AdSense and try to generate revenue through
other means. There's nothing worst than a bully cutting off your revenue
stream without recourse.

I do understand that they are faced with gobs and gobs of fraud and scam-
artists. I get it. However, if the problem is so large that they must hurt
honest people on a regular basis in order to deal with the bad guys I think
they are in over their heads.

It might be far smarter to have an open process where Google throttles down
your account until you fix problems. And, yes, they'd have to tell you what is
wrong so you can address it. Some might argue that this will simply give scam-
artists and abusers more insight into how to game the system. Another way to
look at it is that, if honest people follow the guidelines those gaming the
system will become far more visible and, Google would be able to focus on new
mutations of the bad-guy gene to stomp them out.

In other words, tell me what I am doing wrong and restrict my account to n ads
per day/week/month for three months until I fix x,y,z. Don't hit me over the
head with a sledge hammer and wave good-bye forever.

------
z92
After more than a decade of using and supporting google, now today for the
first in my life, I am feeling that this search and ad monopoly is bad. It's
very much understandable that these type of algorithm overlook will happen.
But being the large organization that google is, it doesn't have the
infrastructure or a working process to take feedback from it's customers and
provide a level of support that its users expect.

Imagine what would have happened if there were 40 competing companies in the
market looking for user support.

~~~
shingen
The biggest mistake Google has made, is behaving in a way such that so few
people really really like them as an organization or company. It almost
guarantees they're going to get drilled by the Feds on anti-trust concerns,
sooner rather than later. There will be few defenders in their corner, ala
Microsoft before them.

~~~
WayneDB
In the end, Microsoft basically got slapped on the wrist. So, what does Google
have to fear?

~~~
travisp
Monetarily they were just slapped on the wrist, but operationally they were
not. Talk to people who worked or work at Microsoft. They've been restricted
from many (arguably good) moves with their software because of the Justice
Department's lawsuit.

Many are hopeful that Microsoft can start to really innovate again now that
the consent decree has recently expired.

~~~
huggyface
I have indeed heard the whiny, victimized rants of some low-level employees
("Woe is us!"), however by and large I think it's nonsense. The restrictions
and oversight the DoJ put on Microsoft were well known and are public record.
They aren't secretly restricting them beyond what we all know.

Microsoft did get but a slap on the wrist, and rightly so. Though it's worth
noting that had Microsoft received the punishment so many sought -- the
breaking up of the company -- the parts would almost certainly be worth much
more than the whole right now.

Microsoft's problems are Microsoft-created. Like RIM, Microsoft was more
focused on entrenching the status quo than planning for the future.

------
dhoe
Lifehacker has been suggesting using AdWords coupons to get free Dropbox
space. [http://lifehacker.com/5854955/how-to-max-out-your-dropbox-
re...](http://lifehacker.com/5854955/how-to-max-out-your-dropbox-referrals-
with-google-adwords-for-free). That's probably why many people are trying
this.

~~~
MrFoof
I ran my own ad a while back (4 to 6 weeks ago?) and faced no issue. I also
think I might know why: I didn't use a coupon to run the ads for free.

I put my OWN money into the account. I also didn't set low bid limits.
Actually, my bids were high enough that they came in much lower than I
anticipated.

The reasoning was simple: I was paying Google for some benefit. Using a free
coupon is simply taking advantage of Google for your own benefit, and that's
not fair to Google -- it's absolutely one-sided.

------
axefrog
Google doesn't just ban accounts for no reason. Sometimes accounts can be
suspended due to false positives in their ToS violation detection algorithms,
but there is a good reason this account was banned.

Google does not like affiliate marketing via their advertising services. This
is because they feel the best user experience is one whereby the user goes
directly to the merchant without an intermediary padding out the middle of the
process, and/or competing with the genuine advertiser and artificially
inflating the number of ads attributed to a single end-merchant.

So in a nut shell, if you don't want your account banned, advertise your own
unique thing that is of value in and of its own right and can stand alone
without any further affiliate links. If you're offering something of value and
it indirectly may lead a visitor to an affiliate link, that's ok, but it can't
be the point of the ad. Google were burned by this early in the days of
Adwords and customers were routinely led down the affiliate path, which caused
serious quality issues in the ads they served up, hence the current ToS.

------
projectedoptics
I had the exact same email. Never used adwords before and only had the one
account. Adwords support were unable to provide me with a straight answer as
to why I was banned and just kept linking me to the terms of service.

~~~
ben1040
Did you use the coupon, or did you pay real money for your AdWords ads?

I ran AdWords ads with real money to advertise my Dropbox referral code, and
everything went dandy (cost about $20 in ad credit).

------
tokenadult
One comment in this interesting thread includes the statement "I haven't read
the TOS" and other comments imply that users began Adwords activity without
reading through the ToS in detail. That goes back to Business 101: if you sign
a contract, be prepared to fulfill the terms of the contract that apply to
your behavior, and know what trade-offs are set up by the terms of the
contract that apply to the other party's behavior. You don't leave yourself
with any legal recourse if the other party follows the contract, you do not
follow the contract, and the other party uses one of its remedies (for example
cancelling the contract) under the contract terms. Freedom of contract is one
of the key ideas that has made the developed world more prosperous and free.
You have the right to tell your friends, "I don't like the contract terms
offered by [name of company]" but there is little use in supposing that a
company will operate otherwise than by its most favorable interpretation of
the actual words of the written agreement. Read the fine contract before
agreeing to it is a general business principle that it is helpful for hackers
to learn. (Yes, I am a lawyer.)

ADDITION IN RESPONSE TO FIRST REPLY:

It is, of course, unusual for most people to read in detail most contracts
they agree to. When you buy an airline ticket, you agree to a contract that is
in very small print on the ticket itself or on the webpage where you agree to
buy the ticket, and much of the small print refers to national laws or
international treaties that you probably don't bother to read. But if a
particular business sets up terms that are off-putting to customers, a smart
competing business may be able to figure out ways to offer better terms (more
megabytes for less money, no restrictions on reselling, or whatever fits the
transaction) and then advertise those terms to customers to gain market share
from the first business. As long as new market entrants can set up their own
agreements in a free market, the equilibrium of actual setting and enforcement
of contract terms will be expected to provide consumer utility and opportunity
for the business to profit. Again, that's freedom of contract. You don't have
to do business with any business that offers you terms you actively dislike.
If you don't think the terms are perfect or "fair," but the trade-off offered
in the terms helps you do what you want to do, you may still agree to the
terms.

~~~
snewman
In principle, of course you are correct. In practice, however, this viewpoint
ignores a key fact of modern life.

The ToS for most services nowadays are extremely draconian and one-sided. The
vast majority of the time, service providers don't bother exercising the
rights they've reserved to themselves. If you try to live strictly within the
safe zone of the ToS of every service you use, you'll be crippled. You either
live a little bit dangerously, or you go home and hide under the bed. When
someone does run afoul of Google's wrath (or whatever other service provider),
often it's not because they did something unusually bad, it's simply that they
had the bad luck to get noticed.

Let me use speed limits as an analogy. It's not uncommon (speaking for the
U.S.) to find a highway with a posted speed limit of X MPH, and most traffic
driving at X+5 or so. A police officer typically won't pull you over for
driving X+5 in that situation, but technically you're breaking the law, and if
they do pull you over, you'll probably wind up paying the ticket.

The situation with common ToS's is that the road is safe for up to 80 MPH, and
most people are going 60, but the posted speed limit is 3 MPH. The police
(service provider) can, at their whim, nail whoever they like for going 20
times the limit.

What's sad about this is that the situation does not incent good behavior, it
incents keeping your head down.

~~~
scott_s
I think there's a difference of kind, and not degree, between the services
that you use for financial gain, and the services you use because you like
them. I can understand if you don't read Facebook's TOS. I haven't. But if I
used Adwords, and I depended on it as a part of my business, I would read the
TOS.

~~~
snewman
Yes, good advice. But you're likely to find some large grey areas, and also
some things that the ToS seems to forbid but seem reasonable / ethical, and
lots of people are doing. If you avoid all of those grey and pseudo-black
areas, you're hamstringing yourself. If you don't avoid them, you're
vulnerable to being shut down arbitrarily. Which path do you choose?

------
Tichy
Hm, that multiple adwords account thing worries me. I actually try to be
honest about it, but I have serveral GMail accounts and Google keeps spamming
me with 100$ adword coupons for each of them. I am not even sure anymore if I
caved in once and used a second account for some adwords experiment.

How about it, Google, if you don't like me using several adwords accounts,
don't spam me with your coupons?

~~~
Danieru
I also had the same "problem".

What I did was leave a comment in their feedback asking that they stop sending
me the coupons. "All you're doing is tempting me to use them against TOS"

A few months later I received in the mail a $100 voucher usable with existing
accounts.

------
user24
I guess it's not related to whether google were wrong to cut off your adwords
account or not, but I can't get past the part where you used a free $100
coupon to buy adwords to get referral credit on dropbox instead of paying
dropbox for a premium account.

It seems clever, but ultimately dishonest. More dishonest to google than to
dropbox I suppose.

~~~
JS_startup
Dropbox wouldn't have made the 10GB/affiliate deal if the trade off of more
free storage for more users wasn't profitable. I doubt they care.

~~~
hyperbovine
Interesting thing about Dropbox is that, owing to their reliance on S3, you
estimate pretty accurately what they spend on their users. People who go to
extreme lengths to max out their referrals, etc. are outliers. I'd guesstimate
the average free account consumes 1gb of overall storage, which costs Dropbox
a whopping $0.06 a month. Even those maxed out, 16gb, pay-nothing accounts are
charged at $0.80/month. When you consider that a 50gb account goes for $9.99
and costs them $2.75 in raw storage fees (probably less since who uses their
full allotment?) you can see how easy it is for them to make money: one paid
account subsidizes hundreds of free accounts. Granted this ignores transfer
and request costs, so the margins are lower, but even with those, I'd guess
they need a ridiculously low conversion rate to turn a profit.

~~~
someperson
Also, it has been suspected previously on HN that Dropbox have negotiated a
better deal since they are apparently Amazon S3's largest customer so your
numbers are likely on the high side.

Although account storage overhead could be a large factor (eg full version
history with binaries etc)

------
smilliken
As an aside, we started noticing people running ads for their Dropbox referral
links about a year ago at MixRank: <http://mixrank.com/a/dropbox.com>. I'm
sure Dropbox loved this behavior at first, but then there were several people
that started running unreasonable/false ads, like "16GB Free Storage Space.
Access your files from everywhere" .. which is clearly setting Dropbox up for
unhappy customers.

------
tnuc
The title is misleading. It should read; "Using free adwords credit to extend
dropbox accounts doesn't work"

Google is trying to attract real customers not people who want to game the
system at Google's expense. No money was ever paid, it was all done using a
promo voucher.

The adwords account was specifically and exclusively set up so a dropbox
account could be extended.

I am sure if you wanted to do some real advertising Google would reinstate the
account.

~~~
dedward
But was it set up so that the person could participate in the dropbox
affiliate program according to dropbox's affiliate ToS? I'm not saying right
or wrong here, but I don't see the evil part yet on the part of the poster.

You run a site, you offer stuff to people to go out and market your product
for you, they do so - as long as they didn't do it by creating fake accounts,
what's the problem?

is affiliate marketing banned in googles ToS?

------
Geoooorge
This banning of AdWords accounts that run traffic for Dropbox referrals is
simply a reflection of Google's known hostility towards affiliate marketers.
AdWords has been know to mass ban affiliate accounts and this is just another
version of affiliate marketing without cash payment.

For those who still want to use PPC for Dropbox referrals, consider Microsoft
adCenter, which has a much friendlier policy towards affiliate marketers.

------
orbitingpluto
All those $75-150 free coupons makes legitimate customers have to pay much
much more per click.

------
wildmXranat
About 4 years ago, I made a mistake to show some ads via Google Adsense on a
forum for gamers. Couple months later I got banned for 'suspicious activity'.
I supplied questions and possibly offending data on multiple occasions, but I
didn't get a single reply back from them. No offense big-G, but you can take
your service and shove it.

Honestly, the ToS and whatever access-wall Google puts up to make the process
actually work is quite astonishingly bad, but as long as everybody sucks on
that teet, there will not be an improvement.

------
Spoom
Does Google not restrict their coupon codes to one use? (This seem especially
important since they appear to be gift certificates rather than discounts.)

Why don't they limit the supply of the "free $100 of advertising" coupons if
they don't intend to follow-through?

------
mrleinad
There's one easy method (which I won't disclose) to increase free space in a
Dropbox account. However, I wouldn't mind paying them since they provide such
a wonderful service, and I've been using their service since the beginning.

The main problem I face to actually pay for something is that is that I don't
have an international credit card, and I live in Argentina. I won't pay my
bank $300 AR$ a year just to get one, which I'll barely use.

------
hung
This happened to me, too. Here's my experience with how unresponsive Google
was (and is):

[http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2011/11/02/dropbox-
referrals...](http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2011/11/02/dropbox-referrals-
with-google-adwords/)

------
Vivtek
I think the easy way around that would be a landing page that wasn't at
Dropbox. It would decrease the number of signups due to the extra click
required, but it wouldn't cost you your AdWords account either.

------
TomGullen
Let me get this right, you signed up for Adwords with $100 free credit they
gave you, used this credit not to advertise your own website as intended, but
to advertise another businesses affiliate link for your benefit. They then
cancelled your account and you're complaining?

The whole point of the free credit is so that businesses can try our their
service with the possibility of buying their own credit afterwards. You're not
using it as intended so they would appear to me to be well in their rights to
block you.

There seem to be a lot of 'horror stories' cropping up, most seem to be from
obscure blogs or websites, where they are going against the TOS or abusing the
system to some degree. As someone who spends money on Adwords I like the fact
they are filtering these types of users out.

~~~
geon
He doesn't mention using an adwords coupon. The mail from Google states that
some of the accounts advertising dropbox did that, but not necessarily OP.

He also doesn't complain about it, but explains how it makes sense from
Googles point of view.

------
michaelkscott
Keyword: Suspended.

They simply haven't banned your account. You've been suspended, happens to
many people. If you appeal to them and start following their TOS, you'll be
fine.

~~~
gravitronic
Really? Thanks. I will attempt to appeal.

~~~
powertower
I don't think they make the distinction between "suspended" and "banned". As
they seem to only use the former... As suspended (which can also mean
permanently suspended).

When you do contact them, and you use gmail, make sure to check your junk/spam
folder for their reply (mine was there).

------
scott_s
Where did you get the $100 promotional coupon? I ask because Google's email
makes it sound like you reused someone else's coupon.

------
ajenkins
You could always run AdWords traffic to a blog talking about how awesome
Dropbox is and include the affiliate link there.

------
underdown
if you had created your own landing page you would have been fine. using a
promo code on someone else's domain? bad idea

------
shingen
This is just Google being a jerk. It's an extremely common behavior from them
when it comes to their ad platforms.

Most businesses prefer to actually work with their customers, listen, and have
a dialogue. Google's insular behavior goes all the way up the food chain to
how Page behaves and operates.

~~~
ohashi
Really? To me this is Google going 'why are dozens of accounts advertising the
same URL with free coupons?' I imagine it happens quite frequently where
people try to use free coupons over and over to never pay for adwords. They
are cheating the system and ripping Google off. There is legitimate gripes
about their non-responsiveness and poor customer support but their logic here
is pretty cut and dry. It's also not malicious.

~~~
sawyer
I don't think the terms of Google's coupon are that 'you can only use this
credit if you intend to spend more than $100 long term advertising on our
platform'.

If it were a matter of 1 user creating multiple accounts then they'd have a
legitimate reason for closing the account. However, it doesn't sound like
that's what's happening. It sounds like they're punishing people for using
their coupon in a way they hadn't intended.

~~~
ohashi
What's the difference between 1 user and multiple users creating accounts to
advertise the same URL with free coupons from their perspective? It looks very
fraudulent and appears to be cheating their system. It seems reasonable to ban
such behavior when it's cheating.

------
wavephorm
I've been blackballed by Google just for using an affiliate system.
Unfortunately their near monopoly puts them in a position where they can get
away with strongarming customers and users into obeying. But they're not going
to make any new friends with this kind of attitude.

------
huggyface
Reading the various horror stories in here, clearly there is an opportunity
for a startup to make lots of cash and clean house in this space. It sounds
like Google arbitrarily are jerks just for the fun of it. Displacing them
should be a piece of cake -- post your new ad network on HN and see the
network effect kick in as it takes over the net.

Or maybe Google actually has a difficult problem they are dealing with, which
is a market with endless ranks of scammers and shady con artists (some of whom
will colour their story to make them a victim, posting it in HN).

------
benologist
It looks like opening multiple Adwords accounts is what cost you your
accounts.

~~~
mooism2
It sounds to me like lots of Dropbox customers opened a single Adwords account
each to run Dropbox ads, and Google mistakenly concluded that they were all
the same person.

~~~
huggyface
I don't think Google has any illusions that it's the same person. Instead they
see it as the same beneficiary.

If this weren't a problem we could have a Hacker News "free ad" board (with
"free" meaning "at the cost of other advertisers". Due to the bid system free
ad coupons cost Google next to nothing) where people could post their pet site
and hundreds of people could use some or all of their "free" $100 to yield
tens of thousands in free ads.

------
zyce
Much easier: Install any Linux distro in VMWare/VirtualBox, and use the CLI to
download and install the dropbox daemon. Rinse and repeat. This only works for
the CLI installation.

I went from 2.2GB --> 10.2GB in a few days doing this during my break.

~~~
gravitronic
This is also very much against the Dropbox ToS whereas the google adwords
method is at best 'grey area'. I brought Dropbox more than 10 new customers.
You didn't.

