I love Dropbox.

It’s a giant USB drive you can use from any­where, it’s a great way to keep back­ups, it’s a great way to share files and it’s free. After spend­ing two hours and 15 min­utes on the lat­est Drop­box pro­mo­tion for 1 GB of extra space ( I was the 343rd fin­isher, which was about 15 min­utes behind the win­ner), I thought there has to be a bet­ter way.  There is — Google Adwords.

Here’s how to max out your Drop­box refer­rals using Google Adwords.

1. Get a coupon for free Google Adwords credit.  Google for “google adwords pro­mo­tional code.”  Under search tools, set your search to the last month or the last week. It might take a few searches, but even­tu­ally you’ll find it. What­ever you do, DO NOT PAY FOR A PROMOTIONAL CODE.  Find­ing the code was the hard­est part, but even­tu­ally you’ll find one.
2. Once you have the voucher (it may take a few days), cre­ate your Google Adwords account.
3. Cre­ate your Ad Cam­paign.  I cre­ated one Cam­paign, with two dif­fer­ent Ad Groups.  The most impor­tant step is to make sure you use your refer­ral link (found here) instead of just putting in dropbox.com.  That’s where the magic hap­pens.  When some­one clicks on the dropbox.com link, they are click­ing on on your refer­ral link, which sends them to the drop­box signup page.
   

   The first, using just the key­word of “Drop­box”, was quite a bit more expen­sive and had a lower return. The CPC (Cost Per Click) of $.24, with 124 clicks out of 11,500 impres­sions (which means it was served on 11,500 pages, and clicked 124 times.) Not all of the clicks resulted in peo­ple actu­ally sign­ing up.

   The sec­ond ad was using the key­word of “Get Drop­box”, which had a CPC of $.13, but I got 64 clicks out of 1,418 impres­sions. The total cost for this ad was between 1/3rd and 1/4 the cost of the first ad.

4. Now all you need to do is sit back and watch the refer­rals roll in. Not all clicks go on to sign up, and not every­body that signs up installs the soft­ware, which is a nec­es­sary step in the process. Of the 188 clicks, 35 joined Drop­box, and 30 installed the soft­ware. If you were start­ing from zero, you’d need 32 peo­ple to sign up in order to get the com­plete 8GB.

There were a cou­ple of things I would do dif­fer­ently. I set up a rel­a­tively low bud­get for the ads per day, which means they will only run a few times per day (for instance, if you have a $5 a day bud­get, and your ad is esti­mated to cost $.25 per click, it will only get, at max, 20 clicks a day.) The time those ads run will be spread out over the course of the day. It’s not bad, but there really wasn’t any rea­son to not just use your esti­mated bud­get at once. Be care­ful to not go over your bud­get, because those cost come out of your pocket.