I started to use Dropbox 6 months ago at work, but I only use it for personal files since November. Now that I seamlessly integrated it on my Kubuntu thanks to Kfilebox, it quickly became clear that Dropbox will potentially be part of my everyday computer life. But before definitely integrate an external dependency to my workflow, I had to test Dropbox further, which requires me to go beyond the default 2Go account.

To maximize the free storage capacity of my account, I completed all the basic installation steps (earned me 250 Mb), then I connected my Dropbox account with Twitter to get 500 Mb. I could have got more free space if I had a Facebook account or was a student.

What’s left to enlarge your capacity is referrals. To speed up this process, and following the steps of others, I setup an AdWords campaign (all of this triggered by a post on Hacker News).

I only targeted the French audience because I feared the HN post would have temporarily inflated the cost of English keywords. Here are the daily stats of my campaign:

And here are the ads I created:

The paused ads above are those which didn’t invited the user to install the Dropbox desktop client. And the latter action is absolutely required to unlock the bonus capacity.

And if your interested in all the details involved, here is a keyword report.

At the end it costs me 31.77€ to get 8Go of additional Dropbox capacity trough referrals:

That’s not cheap, but was a fun hack and a great excuse to learn how to use Google AdWords. And next time I know what I’ll do with those AdWords coupons I regularly give away…