Currency exchange rates change all the time, so if you’re bidding on international markets you’re liable to make mistakes. This dashboard will help you to bid just as much as you intend to, from Chinese Yen to Angolan Kwanza, for example. Talk about being internationally minded!
This Google Sheets dashboard has all the currency information you will ever need to take back to your PPC reporting. Use this sheet to help keep currency conversions simple and up-to-date.
You can use it for all sorts of things, such as:
When analyzing your business across markets, it’s difficult to compare cost-related metrics unless everything is the same currency.
You might also want to check out the volatility of a currency before moving into a new market, especially if you’re going to need to convert money to make payments – if the exchange rate changes by 10 percent over the course of a month, you may end up paying much more at the end of the month than you would have at the start.
Like many of our clients, you may do the majority of your business in the country in which you’re based but have branched out to do some international business, too. Whether your operations are digital or otherwise, it’s usually preferable to have these international ventures use the local currency. For AdWords, this means setting up a different account in a different currency and getting billed for it at the end of the month in this currency.
It also makes reporting a bit of a nightmare – if you’re advertising in the US, Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas and Bermuda, you have to manually look up the exchange rate for each of these each day just to know how much you’re spending. Using a currency conversion function makes this automatic, keeping the exchange rate current, so that you always know your total spend in US dollars.
Currency conversion software can cost anything from $5 to $1,000 a month, depending on how heavy your usage is, how frequently you want rates to update and how flexible you want to be with the currencies you use. In general, the more recent and accurate you want your data to be, the more you are going to pay.
Back in 2011, Google had its own finance service that retrieved exchange rates (and other financial data) for free, making it easy to perform currency conversions in scripts. The service itself has now been deprecated, but a method to access this data lives on through the GOOGLEFINANCE function in Google Sheets.
The sheet has four pages:
If you’re more technically inclined and would like to implement currency conversion in code, here’s a JavaScript template to get you started: