My experience of runnning Google Ads for Dropbox referrals | Hacker News Reader

My experience of runnning Google Ads for Dropbox referrals

blog.tim-rogers.co.uk

108 pointstimrogers46 comments

Sidenote: This is called "brand arbitrage" and it is very, very common in many affiliate spaces, principally because it works disgustingly well. The brand has already made the sale, the affiliate just needs to step in the middle of the purchasing funnel. Many companies will be less than happy if you do it -- sending CPC traffic from brand keywords is explicitly forbidden in a lot of affiliate agreements, and even at places where it isn't explicitly forbidden it will often get you warned or your account closed.

Sidenote #2: If one gets good with using AdWords, one will very quickly not need to worry about the cost of Dropbox. One option is managing campaigns for people, which generally runs on a percent-of-spend model with a monthly minimum (of, say, $2k) for far less than full-time work.

Another option is either becoming an affiliate or promoting your own products, which tend to involve actual risk but have higher upsides and less dependence on your ability to convince clients with $10~100k per month advertising spends to use you as their account manager.

You're, as always, right; but this particular guy spent ~$50 and cost Dropbox only 3GB of storage space. I'm not entirely convinced that they should be unhappy about that - if nothing else, he made "their" keyword more expensive for competitors.

I'm totally ignorant of how Dropbox in particular would feel, just talking about the generalization of this to online marketing. If anybody read it and thought "Hey sweet, all I need to do is bid on a product name and collect affiliate commissions!" hopefully they have one data point more now.

I'd be interested to hear from Dropbox what they think to be honest.

Agreed, but here's something he's missing. That voucher code is one use, per person, per life (they do send extra vouchers out every year or two though). He could have used it for his own project, which may have led to a greater financial reward.

Instead, he's effectively "paid" ~$50 for 3GB of cloud space, for life. Which, on a shared server, would come to cents a year.

Plus, the value of that 3GB is going to decrease over time, as other competing services appear, and file sizes get larger.

All in all, I say he's got a bad deal here. It wasn't "free money" as many are reading.

I totally agree. The deal wasn't that great, and it's certainly more advantageous for the user if they are in the US/Canada and thus get much more free advertising. But I'm happy since I found it to be an interesting experiment, and I got some space out of it.

"he's effectively "paid" ~$50 for 3GB of cloud space, for life. Which, on a shared server, would come to cents a year."

Except he doesn't have to manage that server, he doesn't have to implement the really cool synch between machines, and depending on the person the Dropbox space is probably more stable and secure. It will also be there longer than his interest in maintaining his own server will last. And the extra space on Dropbox is contiguous with the existing space on Dropbox.

It's more than mere extra space. Still may not be worth it, depending, but it's not just space.

>That voucher code is one use, per person, per life (they do send extra vouchers out every year or two though). He could have used it for his own project, which may have led to a greater financial reward.

Couple points: 1. It is just a free coupon, it is not a "once in a lifetime" opportunity. AdWords coupon != money, it is not like you can get $50 in cash if you dont use it. Coupon was free so it is definitely not the same as paying $50 for 3GB of cloud storage.

2. He may have used id a year later for some project, that just may have led to more money. Or, he may have had an unused coupon sitting there collecting dust. I had a coupon for $100 and could not find any use for it, so I used it to bump up my free Dropbox storage. If I ever need to advertise on AdWords, I will just pay for it.

3. When starting a potentially profitable venture the fact that you don't have a $50 coupon will hardly matter. I mean, why worry now that maybe, just maybe, when a pet project becomes the next Tumblr/Twitter/whathaveyou one could use a free AdWords coupon? It is not like anyone will abandon their plans to go big b/c they can't get $50 worth of ads for free.

I like your thinking there actually - there are direct ads competing with Dropbox on the keyword, for instance ads for Box.net. At the end of the day, I'm paying probably above the market rate (since my ad was getting put to the top) and I'm gaining them a customer that might have gone to a competitor.

Did you read it properly: before I read I assumed it was standard arbitrage. He's not affiliating he's cleverly using free adwords impressions to get higher grade service through referrals.

Perhaps it's so close to brand arbitrage as to not be relevant but I found it to be an interesting twist.

Also, it's quite interesting to speculate on the effect on the cost of dropbox related keywords and the benefit to dropbox of getting high value (non-brand) keywords purchased for them using Google's marketing budget.

Aside: appreciated the transparency of the viewport-fixed top bar.

I did this after seeing the posts and I feel that it is a legitimate way of getting more space and it benefits Dropbox.

The person was looking to sign up for Dropbox anyway, and they get something extra out of it as those who use a refer link get a bonus 250MB of space. Dropbox gets an extra sign up which is good for them - who knows if they would have signed up without my ad. They're using the service now and they may even pay in the future. And I'm happy because I got a few extra GB of space!

I agree the whole thing might be slightly morally gray but I think it provides benefit to all.

> Sidenote #2: If one gets good with using AdWords, one will very quickly not need to worry about the cost of Dropbox. One option is managing campaigns for people, which generally runs on a percent-of-spend model with a monthly minimum (of, say, $2k) for far less than full-time work

Sadly, you can skip the part about getting good with using AdWords and still successfully do the campaign management for others thing. A lot of clients don't know how to measure whether or not their campaign manager is actually making them money.

Further from patio11's point - I'm very surprised Dropbox allow this, and wouldn't be surprised at all if they don't. I do a lot of affiliate stuff and 9/10 it is forbidden to used PPC (Adwords) to bid for the brand name, or any variation of it. Normally the advertiser will provide affiliates with a list of stop words that cannot be bid on to prevent this stuff occurring.

Still if there cool with it and you plan on keeping Dropbox for a few years this could prove to be a very cost effective way of getting more space :). Just be warned, if it's against the t's and c's then I would expect people will have their free space revoked.

I really don't see why in this case. They aren't actually arbitraging ad space that Dropbox would be in otherwise. If anything, it's Google that is getting fleeced $50 a pop. But really, Dropbox is getting cheap advertising for the low cost of hard drive space, Google is getting fresh-faced hackers to try their cash cow product, aforementioned hackers get larger folders, and people looking for Dropbox find Dropbox, so really it's win-win-win-win all around.

If people are googling for a brand which only has one product, then the sale had effectively already been made.

This extra "advertising" doesn't actually bring in any extra users, and is only an extra cost for Dropbox.

When I did this, most of my most clicked terms were for things like "free online storage". "Dropbox" didn't really get many clicks. Though, I have no way of knowing which terms ultimately converted better.

Another data point: I obtained nearly 30 referrals this way for a total of ~$40.00 USD. Another 12 people signed up but didn't install the desktop client. I said "Free Dropbox Account. Get 2.5GB of storage space. Signup takes 60 seconds." I limited the ad to the United States and only keywords with Dropbox/drop box in them. I e-mailed everyone who registered but didn't complete installation with a "Don't forget, you have to install Dropbox to get the rest of your free space!" welcome e-mail. Sadly, I didn't include a trackable link but about 25% of the stalled out referrals went on to complete, saving me several dollars.

I think Dropbox realizes I captured some people they might have otherwise lost and that unless I max my space, they have given me nothing.

Dropbox's business model is successful because they give you 2GB space but you can guarantee that most people will only use a fraction of that.

I took a similar path and decided to email those who signed up but didn't "complete" their registration with a download - it doesn't appear to have been successful, but time will tell.

I just checked my referral log. It's been a few months now and it looks like either one or none of them have converted since I hit the limit. I may e-mail mine a second time to see if that converts a few more. When I e-mailed my referrals the first time, it was less than 24 hours after they signed up and I think that's why I saw as many conversions as I did.

A 'clever' intern of mine was taking the pastebin dumps from some recent anonymous hacks, and pasting all the email addresses into Dropbox's referral system. It's a bit more unethical than buying ads for referrals... but certainly cheaper.

I think dropbox may need a bit more controls on how many email addresses you can paste in...

Spamming your Dropbox referral link is a quick method to get your account disabled, not extra space.

WARNING TO THOSE WHO ATTEMPT THIS:

I did this. And it worked. But there was a cost:

I was banned from Google Adwords.

More details here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3575868

Happened to me, too. I did end up getting the full amount of referrals possible before it happened though :)

I did the same thing, with several free Adwords vouchers I got from various places, as well as one Bing voucher.

I preserved my data here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AupgXsRU8E9UdDg...

TL;DR My cost per completed acquisition was $13 per 500MB referral; my actual total out of pocket cost was the ~$5 overall of where I overspent my promo.

Combined with earlier referrals, I've maxed out at 18.25 GB of free storage.

$13 seems like a very high price per conversin - I didn't do much better, but that still seems a little over the odds.

I stopped using Dropbox referrals, when I discovered that I could see the e-mail address of the people I had referred - and I assume they could do the same with me.

It felt like an invasion of privacy on both parts, so I asked them to delete my referrals - which, as I recall, they did. I only had two referrals or something.

Is this still the case at Dropbox?

Yeah, I think that's a little sketchy too. It's fairly okay for the intended use of the referral system but it still seems a bit off. I have used it to send emails to the people who clicked my ads but didn't download Dropbox.

Funny coincidence: I started doing this just this morning (it's 1pm now in Germany) after receiving a 100€ Coupon from Google. Right now I already have twelve referrals, which makes 6GB of extra space for me.

Wish I had a €100 coupon! It would have made this a lot cheaper for me and would have got me more referrals!

I'm sure most everybody is aware of this but you can also get up to 8GB additional free storage by downloading their beta client and helping them test out the "Camera Upload" feature.

He actually states that in the article, "Another good way at the moment is using the Dropbox beta client which gives you 500MB extra for every 500MB of photos you upload, up to 5GB."

Well that's what I get for merely skimming an article. Also sorry for posting the wrong information. 5GB it is.

I just did a blog post about using Dropbox from Ruby since a Ruby-based library had just been released. Adding a note saying "If you're not yet on Dropbox, sign up here" and within a month I maxed out my account. Indeed, I switched the link around a few people who asked if they could do it too.

Given how much traffic you can get with a simple but smart blog post nowadays (especially with HN and Reddit around), use content marketing instead. It's easier, gets you more kudos, and only costs a little time.

I found that a great keyword is 'dropbocks': I got 0.01€ cpc and a very good conversion rate. I maxed out several friend accounts spending 3€ each or less if I remember well. The keyword is great because it filters out who already use dropbox, if someone misspell it probably it doesn't have an account, otherwise with other keywords you'll probably get lot of people that already have an account clicking on your ads just to get to the dropbox login.

I have managed to get 24GB of free dropbox space. I was able to do this because I am an early adopter and when Dropbox first game out, I started telling all my friends about it by using my referral link.

Ask your friends, you will be surprised at how many people still have not heard of Dropbox.

I did this as well a couple months ago. The keyword "dropbox" got 99% of the clicks at around the same cost as you $0.13 cpc. I wound up spending $65 on ads (with no voucher sadly) and now have 16GB of free space.

Alternatively, you could have hired a guy from Asia on oDesk for $3/$4 to get 40 people to signup for Dropbox with your referral link. Much more cost effective.

Thanks for the interest everyone - if you want to ask me any questions, feel free to ask in comments or find me on Twitter, I'm @timrogers.

You should update your linked article with your Dropbox referral link, seeing as you're being linked to/getting traffic -- you never know!

I've done that now - thanks! Annoyed now that I didn't have Analytics on my blog, got no idea how much traffic I got from this.

I'm now doing this same thing with Bing advertising using a free voucher for £30 (~$47) - I'll make a post with my results when done :)

$2 + Mechanical Turk = 16GB of DB Space.

This violates Mechanical Turk's ToS, unfortunately.

Doesn't this violate DB policy too?

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