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CPV – cost per view – is the heartbeat metric of video advertising. It tells you exactly how much you are paying for real attention, not just impressions or accidental clicks. By dividing total campaign cost by total views, marketers see in an instant which creatives, audiences, and channels are buying meaningful watch time instead of burning budget. In Google Sheets or Excel, CPV becomes a living control panel: tweak bids, change targeting, paste in new spend, and you immediately see how your CPV shifts. Over weeks, patterns emerge: certain geos are cheap but low intent, some formats are pricey but convert like crazy. Without a clean, reliable CPV formula, you are flying blind.Now imagine delegating all that CPV grunt work to an AI computer agent. Instead of you downloading CSVs at midnight, the agent logs into your ad accounts, copies costs and views into Sheets and Excel, applies the CPV formula, flags campaigns that cross your target threshold, and drops a short narrative summary in your inbox. You stop wrestling with spreadsheets and start making crisp decisions about where every dollar of video budget should go.
### 1. Manual ways to calculate CPV in Google Sheets and ExcelAt its core, CPV is simple: **CPV = Cost / Views**. The work is in keeping it accurate across campaigns and platforms.**Method 1: Single-campaign CPV in Google Sheets**1. Create a new Google Sheet and add headers in row 1: - A1: Campaign - B1: Cost - C1: Views - D1: CPV2. Paste your campaign name, total cost, and total views into columns A–C.3. In D2, enter the formula: - `=IF(C2=0,"",B2/C2)`4. Drag the fill handle down to copy the formula for additional rows.5. Format column D as currency.Official docs on formulas in Sheets: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093480**Pros:** fast for a few campaigns, easy to sanity check. **Cons:** you must manually paste data and can easily mistype numbers.**Method 2: Multi-platform CPV in Excel**1. In Excel, create headers: - A1: Date - B1: Platform - C1: Campaign - D1: Cost - E1: Views - F1: CPV2. Paste daily exports from YouTube, TikTok, Meta into rows under these headers.3. In F2, enter: - `=IF(E2=0,"",D2/E2)`4. Convert the range to a Table (select range → Insert → Table). This auto-copies the formula down.5. Add a PivotTable (Insert → PivotTable) to analyze CPV by platform or campaign.Excel formula help: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-formula-8259d47c-87c6-4aee-8f32-08fcd6e483fb**Pros:** powerful analysis with PivotTables, flexible filtering. **Cons:** still manual imports, error-prone copy/paste, no live data.**Method 3: Weekly CPV trend log (Sheets or Excel)**1. Create a log sheet with columns: Week, Campaign, Cost, Views, CPV.2. Each week, paste fresh Cost and Views totals.3. Use the same CPV formula as above.4. Insert a line chart: Week on X-axis, CPV on Y-axis per campaign.**Pros:** great for storytelling in meetings; you see CPV drift. **Cons:** still lots of manual work; easy to skip weeks.---### 2. No-code methods using automation toolsManual copy/paste collapses as soon as you manage multiple brands or channels. No-code tools can push raw spend and views into Sheets or Excel for you.**Method 4: Connect ad platforms to Google Sheets with no-code tools**You can use tools like Coupler.io, Zapier, or Make to pull metrics such as Cost and Views into a sheet on a schedule.1. Design a destination sheet: - A: Date - B: Platform - C: Campaign - D: Cost - E: Views - F: CPV (formula column)2. In your chosen tool, create an automation: - Trigger: schedule daily at 7am. - Action: fetch data from Google Ads, YouTube, TikTok, Meta, etc. - Destination: append rows into the sheet.3. In F2 of the sheet, set `=IF(E2=0,"",D2/E2)` and apply to entire column.4. Build charts or dashboards directly in Sheets and share with your team.**Pros:** no more exports, data refreshes itself; you still own the logic in the sheet. **Cons:** each new platform or account needs config; limited ability to handle weird edge cases (custom date ranges, exceptions) without complex scenarios.**Method 5: Feed Excel from cloud storage or BI connectors**1. Save your ad platform CSV exports into a OneDrive or SharePoint folder.2. In Excel, use **Get Data → From File → From Folder** to connect to that folder.3. Combine the files in Power Query, keeping only Cost and Views columns plus campaign metadata.4. Load the query result into a table.5. Add a CPV column in the table with `=[@Cost]/[@Views]`.6. Refresh daily with one click, or set up scheduled refresh if using Excel with Power BI or Office 365.**Pros:** robust for analysts, good for large datasets. **Cons:** needs some Power Query knowledge; still semi-manual unless IT sets up scheduled refresh.---### 3. Scaling CPV with an AI agent (Simular) at desktop levelAt some point, the real bottleneck is not the CPV formula – it is all the *surrounding clicks*: logging into ad platforms, picking date ranges, exporting CSVs, cleaning columns, refreshing dashboards, sending summaries.This is where a Simular AI agent shines. Instead of scripting APIs, you delegate the entire workflow as if you were onboarding a junior analyst.**Method 6: Agent-driven CPV updater for Google Sheets**Imagine your Monday morning.1. You define the workflow once for the agent: - Open browser, sign into your ad accounts. - Navigate to each campaign report, set last 7 days. - Export stats or copy Cost and Views. - Open a specific Google Sheet, paste data into the raw data tab. - Ensure the CPV formula column recalculates. - Check for anomalies (e.g., CPV above a threshold) and note them.2. In Simular Pro, this becomes a transparent sequence of actions you can inspect and tweak.3. You trigger the agent on a schedule or via webhook from your reporting stack.**Pros:** behaves like a human operator, works across any web UI without waiting for APIs; production-grade reliability for long, multi-step workflows. **Cons:** initial setup requires clear instructions and a clean sheet structure.**Method 7: Cross-channel CPV steward in Excel**For agencies or finance teams who live in Excel:1. The Simular agent opens Excel on your desktop or virtual machine.2. It refreshes linked data sources or imports fresh CSVs from a shared folder.3. It verifies that the CPV column equals Cost divided by Views on each row, fixing broken formulas.4. It generates pivot tables and charts, then saves and closes the workbook.5. Finally, it emails or Slacks you a short narrative: which campaigns improved CPV, which slipped above target.**Pros:** hands-free upkeep of your master Excel model, consistent calculations, human-readable logs of every step. **Cons:** best run on a stable machine; needs occasional review as you change report layouts.**Method 8: End-to-end CPV monitoring with alerting**1. Define your CPV guardrails per campaign or channel in a sheet (target, max tolerable CPV).2. Have the Simular AI agent update cost and views daily and recompute CPV.3. If CPV for any row exceeds the threshold, the agent: - Highlights the row in red. - Adds a brief note about the percentage change. - Sends you or your team a message with a one-paragraph summary.**Pros:** you no longer hunt for problems; the agent surfaces them. **Cons:** you still decide *what* to change in the ad platforms – bids, targeting, creatives – but now with far better visibility.Done right, the CPV formula becomes the simplest piece of your stack. The real magic is in how you orchestrate the surrounding work – and that is exactly what an AI computer agent like Simular is built to handle.
