Many people find Google Sheets to be a useful and simple way to present and analyze business performance and marketing data. In particular, many marketing agencies use Google Sheets for reporting when they have clients who want to see the actual data (and have the option of doing their own calculations with it) instead of just the final charts, graphs, or PowerPoint presentations.

However, Google Sheets can be a challenge if you need to pull and organize a large amount of data from many different marketing platforms. 

Downloading data from each marketing platform, importing it into Google or Excel spreadsheets, and having to update and repeat this every week (or month) can become unwieldy and very time consuming.

If you're doing significant amounts of reporting in Google Sheets, finding a Google Sheets reporting tool that can automate a couple key processes is a massive time saver, specifically:

• Being able to pull data fromanyplatform:The ability to connect to and automatically pull data from allyour marketing platforms into Google Sheets,so you don't have to import anydata manually (which is tedious and not scalable if you have many campaigns or clients to do this for).
• Doing advanced and scalable calculations beforethe data hits Google Sheets:The ability to doeverythingat scale (e.g calculations, defining metrics) across tens or hundreds of campaigns or clients and import it all directly and cleanly into Google Sheets.

Our platform, TapClicks does exactly this. We can directly connect to any marketing platform or data source (so you never have to manually import data into Google Sheets) and automate the repetitive data manipulations and calculations you have to do before every report (e.g. calculate cost per acquisition, add up all campaign spend, etc.).

And now, we can feed all this information directly into Google Sheets for you. You can use Google Sheets as a live dashboard without the need to import data from add-ons or manage a large amount of data within a Google spreadsheet. 

This means that agencies and marketing teams get the best of both worlds. They can easily access all their business or marketing data exactly how they and their clients want to see it from the TapClicks platform and/orwithin Google Sheets, saving a massive amount of time.

Want to see how easy it is to use the TapClicks Google Sheets integration? Try our free 14-day trial, or schedule a demo.

Factor #1: TapClicks Connects to All Your Marketing Platforms and Feeds the Data into Google SheetsAutomatically

 

Pullinga lot of data from many different platforms manually is hugely time consuming.You literally have to go into each platform and copy and paste data or actually type it into Google Sheetsmanually every day, or whenever you need it.

For example, if you want to import Facebook Ads data into a spreadsheet, you would go into your Facebook account, export the campaign data you need into a CSV, import that into a new sheet and then spend time organizing and manipulating that data to create a custom report.

Some platforms don't allow you to easily export data (e.g. Shopify, The Trade Desk, Simplify), so you might need to use a particular Google Sheets add-on for these or export the data in a specific way (e.g. csv file).

Once you've pulled the data, you then need to spend time reformatting it, as there are variances between platforms. For example, you might find there are hashes that need to be removed or extra columns you don't want. Someone has to do this manually in order to organize the data to fit in with what you want.

And, even if you are using a tool with a Google Sheets add-on, you will not be able to pull data from all the marketing platforms you need because most tools don't integrate with every platform.

So, even though a tool might help with pulling some of your information, you will still need to go into the platforms it doesn't integrate with manually and follow the same process there. This negates the whole purpose of having a tool that's supposed to automate the process for you.

With TapClicks, importing data into a spreadsheet can be automated from all marketing and ad platforms including custom or homebuilt platforms.

Specifically, while many marketing dashboard tools were built to integrate with the most popular marketing platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics), TapClicks has over 250 instant-on connectors with all the main marketing-specific platforms.

This means you can extract your data from any of these platforms automatically.

What's also very useful is the fact that you can import 12 months' worth of historical dataand include it in your reports from the get-go! There's no need to wait a few months to report on data.

In addition to our current instant-on connectors, we can build custom connections to any platform or data source that we don't already have a connection to. We simply set up what we call smart connectors that automatically and immediately pulls your data.

To date, we've connected to over 1,400 data sources& and the list continues to grow.

So, if there's a lesser-known platform that you need to connect to, the TapClicks team will set this up for you. And, if you need to import data from a private data source (e.g. your database or an email attachment), we can also do that.

TapClicks effectively becomes a custom platform pulling information from all possible data sourcesautomatically and directly into Google Sheets.

Here's a short demo of how to set up a smart connector in TapClicks:

 

TapClicks Manages Your Data Connections So You Don't Have To

Another advantage of connecting your marketing platform and data sources through TapClicks is that our team makes sure those API connections stay up to date.

So, if there are any changes to a platform's API, the TapClicks team (who have established relationships with these platforms) will ensure that any potential breaks are immediately fixed.

This means you and your IT team don't have to spend time and money working out what's happened and what might need fixing.

With TapClicks, connection management in our service, so it's all taken care of at no extra cost to you.

How Your Data Feeds into Google Sheets with TapClicks

Let's take a look at how your data sources (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) feed into Google Sheets, so you can create reports.

Once you've added the TapClicks add-on, sign in to your Google account.

The drop-down panel (or sidebar)on the right-hand side means we can set what parameters we want to be pulled into the Google Sheet.

You select the Data Source you want the data to be pulled from and how you want that to be viewed, grouped, which columns you want to be filled, and then which date range you want the data to cover.

Once we've filled out those data fields with what we want to pull in from the platforms we select, a Query is sent to the TapClicks database where, in a few seconds, the data from that query populates.

For the example above, columns A and B were populated.

Our example is simple, but you could have thousands of rows of data from one platform (in our example it was Google Analytics data) or you could include many different platforms, campaigns, or clients.

TapClicks Automatically Refreshes Data Whenever You Want

We explained above how the data is pulled into TapClicks and how you can import data from any data source you want, so you can run reports within Google Sheets. Another essential feature of any reporting tool is the ability to refresh the data whenever you want.

With TapClicks, you can set the frequency of when. you want that data to be refreshed by using the drop-down panel within Google Sheets.

In our example screenshot above, we've set the frequency for the Google Sheets data to refresh daily at 10 AM.

This means that the data would be automatically updated every day; there's no reason to have to do this manually. You configure it once and TapClicks does it for you thereafter.

So, your data can be refreshed from all your platforms directly into Google Sheets where you can use your spreadsheet as a live dashboard.

Factor #2: Do Advanced and Scalable Calculations Before the Data Hits Google Sheets

 

There are two important reasons why you'd want to do calculations on your metricsbeforethey are pulled into Google Sheetsinstead of trying to do them once they are in your spreadsheet.

1. Organizing a Lot of Data Becomes Unwieldy

If you're dealing with several campaigns within one spreadsheet, it becomes complicated and unwieldy.

For example, let's say you have a client who has 35 different campaigns for several product lines in Google Ads, Google Shopping, and Facebook Ads. There are overall metrics you want to look at for all 35 campaigns (e.g. total web traffic, total clicks or total engagement). You also need to decide which individual metrics go into each of these umbrella terms and build formulas that point to the right columns and cells to grab the right data to calculate these overall metrics.

You can do this within Google Sheets by pulling in dozens of columns from each platform and setting up a complex web of formulas to do your calculations for you. However, that's a lot of data from a lot of different places, so it can become cumbersome to manage.

And, if you have several clients you need to do this for each month, it's going to be a huge time suck (e.g. every month when you refresh the raw data, you have to make sure the formulas are still pointing to the right cells, etc.).

With TapClicks, all your number-crunching can be done before the data is pulled into Google Sheets. You can define a metric on the TapClicks side so that the data is neatly pulled into Google Sheets. You export that metric into Google Sheets as one column, instead of dozens of columns that you'd have to pull in from all the different platforms.

For example, you can define terms such as Engagement to represent exactly what you want across different platforms (e.g. Facebook likes, Twitter re-tweets, shares, Instagram comments whatever you decide). These metrics can then be used as your definition of engagement across as many Google Sheet reports, campaigns, and clients as you want.

This saves you an enormous amount of time that would otherwise be spent going back and forth between spreadsheets and manually number crunching.  

With TapClicks, you can set up your metrics just once and use them forever across different campaigns, dashboards, and clients to fit in with all your reporting processes.

Here's a video showing you how to set up calculations:

 

2. Doing Advanced Calculations within Google Sheetsis Not Easy

While there are many calculations that you can do within Google Sheets, there are some advanced calculations that are not possible (or not easy) to do.

With TapClicks, there are advanced calculations you can set up to create dynamic text fields. This means you can track specific words or phrases across your data.

Example: Filtering and Adding Results by Campaign

A use case for this might be if you have a tire manufacturer as a client.

They want to view their data by different tire brand names and see how each has performed across tens or hundreds of different ad campaigns.

So, what you're trying to do is find all campaigns with a specific tire brand in the campaign name (e.g. Goodyear) and add up stats for all of those campaigns. While that's technically possible in a spreadsheet, it can be challenging and many people don't have the spreadsheet formula skills to pull this off (or would have to watch a bunch of tutorials to learn).

But TapClicks makes a calculation like this easy.

In our example above, we've created an advanced calculation saying if the campaign name contains the word HNP label it All HNP Campaigns and label everything else as other.

In our example below, there are 266 Facebook Ad campaigns, all pulling in data from our data sources. It would be extremely tedious to scroll through all 266 and find which ones have HNP in their campaign name, but now that we set up our advanced calculation, you can see the total spend for our new group All HNP Campaigns summarized neatly on the right-hand side.

You could also use this function to group and view data by location type (e.g. city, area, region, national), or just one location. You could also use it to view internal data, or a specific product sector.

The possibilities are endless.

The key with all of these calculations is that with TapClicks, you only have to set them up once. Then every week or every month (whenever needed), the calculations are automated across all the data before it's pulled into your Google Sheet reports.

With TapClicks, you are setting up these advanced calculations without the hassle of dealing with many rows and columns in a spreadsheet.

For this HNP example above, imagine if all 266 campaigns had 30 days of spend data and a campaign name that would be 31 rows for all 266 campaigns!

You'd have to set up spreadsheet formulas that correctly look at all 266 campaign name cells, then for the ones that have HNP in the name, then add up all 30 days of spend into one number.

And what if next month you have 300 campaigns, instead of 266? You'd need to make sure your formula extends to all 300. These rows and columns logistics are common hurdles with spreadsheet formulas. Setting up calculations in TapClicks avoids all of that.

Want to Try Our TapClicks Google SheetsReporting Tool?

For clients who want to view their marketing data within Google Sheets, TapClicks provides the perfect automated solution.

Not only can TapClicks pull data from every marketing platform or data source you can think of, but it automates and scales calculations within the TapClicks platform as well as within Google Sheets.

This means that you get the best of both worlds: the simplicity of displaying marketing data within Google Sheets with the added bonus of being able to do complex calculations within TapClicks; all of which is automated and scalable. This is a massive saving on time and resources.

Want to see how easy it is to use the TapClicks Google Sheets integration? Try our free 14-day trial.