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:

AdWords campaign dashboard for the Dropbox campaign over two weeks, the click curve flat until it spikes to 59 clicks on 30 November then collapses back to zero

And here are the ads I created:

The ten French text ads in the campaign with their individual click, impression and cost figures, three of them paused, totalling 186 clicks on 9,998 impressions for €31.77

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.

Dropbox referral page listing twenty invitations with their email addresses blurred, each marked either Joined or Completed

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:

Country breakdown reduced to a single row for France: 186 clicks, 9,996 impressions, 1.86% click-through, €31.77 spent

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… ;)