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Running Dropbox affiliate ads cost me my Adwords account

158 points by gravitronic 15y ago

benologist 15y ago
It looks like opening multiple Adwords accounts is what cost you your accounts.
- mooism2 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
- Lazare 15y ago
  Not exactly. If you read his post closely, he claims to have only had a single account. It's Google which is claiming that he "maintains multiple AdWords accounts simultaneously serving ads for similar or related keywords and/or businesses."
  - dholowiski 15y ago
    This makes me wonder if we are hearing the whole story. Did he have multiple adwords accounts, or only just the one?
- gravitronic 15y ago
  I only had one adwords account.
  - gnur 15y ago
    Did you run multiple campains with the same target link?
    - davidu 15y ago
      This can't possibly be a violation -- this is standard operating procedure in the SEM world.
    - gravitronic 15y ago
      One campaign, multiple ads. Which as the other commenter says, is totally the norm.
projectedoptics 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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).
mrleinad 15y ago
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.
Vivtek 15y ago
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.
shingen 15y ago
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.
- JS_startup 15y ago
  I went through the sales processes for AdWords and Bing adCenter simultaneously and the difference was night and day. I could tell from the start that Google had zero interest in customer service and if something went wrong I'd be SOL.
- ohashi 15y ago
  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.
  - nodata 15y ago
    Isn't the problem then the free coupons?
  - sawyer 15y ago
    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.
    - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
      Does Google let one account use more than one coupon? Certainly the terms of the coupon say one per account (I have read that because I did want to use more than one).
z92 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    In the end, Microsoft basically got slapped on the wrist. So, what does Google have to fear?
    - travisp 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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.
user24 15y ago
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.
- karterk 15y ago
  I don't really know his intentions. It might just have been a way to learn adwords. From Google's point of view, if he really did learn and get good results, then it's likely he will use adwords for another project, and this time paying out of his own pockets. From Dropbox's point of view, yes people seem to be exploiting them in a way - but I think that the space they give away is not significant to the number of people out there who are doing this marketing for them on their behalf.
  - gravitronic 15y ago
    This is true. I didn't invent the method but I did do it and it's not as honest to Dropbox as paying them (although I brought them >10 new customers) To Google though I don't think I did anything wrong: - I learnt adwords and would have considered using it again as I learnt the reach was tremendous for the price. - Even using a coupon, my bidding on adwords keeps the value higher so the overall market price of ads is higher. This has been a theorized reason why $100 Google adwords coupons are so easy to get.
    - dedward 15y ago
      honesty has nothing to do with it..... referral programs are a way of marketing your product..... getting others to do yourmarketingfor you in exchange for something. sometimes cash, in this case axtra services. bringing in new customers is farmorevaluable than one subscription ( as those customers may go the referral route, etc). many online services got hugr this way..... the referral markets are big business.
- JS_startup 15y ago
powertower 15y ago
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 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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 $100 credit beding used for affiliate direct linking and flagged the account. Just as an aside I have 13GB on dropbox now and got the additional storage by using the technique outlined in the article. My biggest difference was that the account was seasoned and I was spending my own money, not google coupon money.
Tichy 15y ago
Hm, that multiple adwords account thing worries me. I actually try to be honest about it, but I have serveral GMail accounts and Google keeps spamming me with 100$ 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 15y ago
  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.
dhoe 15y ago
Lifehacker has been suggesting using AdWords coupons to get free Dropbox space. http://lifehacker.com/5854955/how-to-max-out-your-dropbox-referrals-with-google-adwords-for-free http://lifehacker.com/5854955/how-to-max-out-your-dropbox-re.... That's probably why many people are trying this.
- MrFoof 15y ago
  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.
krelian 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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!
zyce 15y ago
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.
- timrogers 15y ago
  Can you explain this please? Never heard of it.
- gravitronic 15y ago
  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.
- presidentender 15y ago
  So rather than using a couple of free services in a way they didn't predict, you just commit outright fraud?
- moe 15y ago
  And this is why we can't have nice things... There's plenty companies who deserve your abuse. Dropbox is not one of them.
- dedward 15y ago
  And might get banned for it... thats blatant referral program abuse..... it isnt "free if you are clever" its "free if you bring us new people in the door"
scott_s 15y ago
Where did you get the $100 promotional coupon? I ask because Google's email makes it sound like you reused someone else's coupon.
ricg 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Please do not contact us again. Tell us how you really feel about your users, google...
michaelkscott 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Really? Thanks. I will attempt to appeal.
  - powertower 15y ago
    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).
- alanfang 15y ago
  Suspended = banned in adwords. You can try appealing if you want to waste your time talking to a chat bot and them rejecting your appeal a few days later.
wavephorm 15y ago
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.
orbitingpluto 15y ago
All those $75-150 free coupons makes legitimate customers have to pay much much more per click.
tokenadult 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
hung 15y ago
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-with-google-adwords/ http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2011/11/02/dropbox-referrals...
tnuc 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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?
wildmXranat 15y ago
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 15y ago
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?
axefrog 15y ago
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.
ajenkins 15y ago
You could always run AdWords traffic to a blog talking about how awesome Dropbox is and include the affiliate link there.
robomartin 15y ago
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.
underdown 15y ago
if you had created your own landing page you would have been fine. using a promo code on someone else's domain? bad idea
Geoooorge 15y ago
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.
smilliken 15y ago
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 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.
huggyface 15y ago
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).
TomGullen 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

158 points by gravitronic 15y ago

benologist 15y ago

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

mooism2 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
Lazare 15y ago
Not exactly. If you read his post closely, he claims to have only had a single account. It's Google which is claiming that he "maintains multiple AdWords accounts simultaneously serving ads for similar or related keywords and/or businesses."
- dholowiski 15y ago
  This makes me wonder if we are hearing the whole story. Did he have multiple adwords accounts, or only just the one?
gravitronic 15y ago
I only had one adwords account.
- gnur 15y ago
  Did you run multiple campains with the same target link?
  - davidu 15y ago
    This can't possibly be a violation -- this is standard operating procedure in the SEM world.
  - gravitronic 15y ago
    One campaign, multiple ads. Which as the other commenter says, is totally the norm.

projectedoptics 15y ago

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 15y ago
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).

mrleinad 15y ago

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.

Vivtek 15y ago

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.

shingen 15y ago

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.

JS_startup 15y ago
I went through the sales processes for AdWords and Bing adCenter simultaneously and the difference was night and day. I could tell from the start that Google had zero interest in customer service and if something went wrong I'd be SOL.
ohashi 15y ago
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.
- nodata 15y ago
  Isn't the problem then the free coupons?
- sawyer 15y ago
  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.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    Does Google let one account use more than one coupon? Certainly the terms of the coupon say one per account (I have read that because I did want to use more than one).

z92 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  In the end, Microsoft basically got slapped on the wrist. So, what does Google have to fear?
  - travisp 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.

user24 15y ago

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.

karterk 15y ago
I don't really know his intentions. It might just have been a way to learn adwords. From Google's point of view, if he really did learn and get good results, then it's likely he will use adwords for another project, and this time paying out of his own pockets. From Dropbox's point of view, yes people seem to be exploiting them in a way - but I think that the space they give away is not significant to the number of people out there who are doing this marketing for them on their behalf.
- gravitronic 15y ago
  This is true. I didn't invent the method but I did do it and it's not as honest to Dropbox as paying them (although I brought them >10 new customers) To Google though I don't think I did anything wrong: - I learnt adwords and would have considered using it again as I learnt the reach was tremendous for the price. - Even using a coupon, my bidding on adwords keeps the value higher so the overall market price of ads is higher. This has been a theorized reason why $100 Google adwords coupons are so easy to get.
  - dedward 15y ago
    honesty has nothing to do with it..... referral programs are a way of marketing your product..... getting others to do yourmarketingfor you in exchange for something. sometimes cash, in this case axtra services. bringing in new customers is farmorevaluable than one subscription ( as those customers may go the referral route, etc). many online services got hugr this way..... the referral markets are big business.
JS_startup 15y ago

powertower 15y ago

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 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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

Tichy 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

dhoe 15y ago

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

MrFoof 15y ago
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.

krelian 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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!

zyce 15y ago

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.

timrogers 15y ago
Can you explain this please? Never heard of it.
gravitronic 15y ago
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.
presidentender 15y ago
So rather than using a couple of free services in a way they didn't predict, you just commit outright fraud?
moe 15y ago
And this is why we can't have nice things... There's plenty companies who deserve your abuse. Dropbox is not one of them.
dedward 15y ago
And might get banned for it... thats blatant referral program abuse..... it isnt "free if you are clever" its "free if you bring us new people in the door"

scott_s 15y ago

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

ricg 15y ago

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 15y ago
Please do not contact us again. Tell us how you really feel about your users, google...

michaelkscott 15y ago

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 15y ago
Really? Thanks. I will attempt to appeal.
- powertower 15y ago
  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).
alanfang 15y ago
Suspended = banned in adwords. You can try appealing if you want to waste your time talking to a chat bot and them rejecting your appeal a few days later.

wavephorm 15y ago

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.

orbitingpluto 15y ago

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

tokenadult 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

hung 15y ago

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

tnuc 15y ago

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 15y ago
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?

wildmXranat 15y ago

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 15y ago

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?

axefrog 15y ago

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.

ajenkins 15y ago

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

robomartin 15y ago

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.

underdown 15y ago

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

Geoooorge 15y ago

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.

smilliken 15y ago

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 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.

huggyface 15y ago

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).

TomGullen 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.