Running Dropbox affiliate ads cost me my Adwords account

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.