Incorrect exchange rates used in Google EFT Payments December 2007

Posted January 2nd, 2008 in Miscellaneous Postings

I use Google's Adsense program for serving ads on a number of sites I own. I don't earn a  particularly large amount of money from this but it's a nice passive revenue stream from those sites. My monthly Google payments are done by EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) and are converted from United States Dollars into New Zealand Dollars before the EFT is done. Unfortunately this month they managed to get the exchange rates the wrong way around.

Normally the exchange rate would look something like this (taken from the November payment):

Exchange Rate: 1.325 : 1

If we take an entirely hypothetical example of US$1000 of earnings, this would translate into NZ$1325. However, this month Google have managed to use the reverse exchange rate to calculate the NZ$ amount, ie they've used the NZD to USD conversation ratio instead of USD to NZD. The result is an exchange rate like so:

Exchange Rate: 0.768 : 1

The result from our hypothetical example of US$1000 of earnings would result in just NZ$768, which is just over half what I should have received.

I have emailed Google's support department to see what's going on, and when I can expect to receive the corrected calculation and balance of payment. I'll post again when I have received a reply. In the meantime, if you receive EFT payments from Google for Adsense payments in a non United States Dollar currency, you should check to see if this has happened to you as well and email them if it has.