There are a variety of add-ons and built-in functions for seamlessly and automatically pulling business data into Google Sheets from external sources.
Once business data is in Sheets, it can be manipulated and analyzed in several ways.
Here are six functions and add-ons for importing information into Google Sheets. All are free of charge.
Blogs and News Feeds
Social media marketers continually seek fresh, audience-relevant content to share on social channels.
The IMPORTFEED function can be used to populate sheets with feeds from
- WordPress
- Google Alerts
- Google Blogs
- Any other RSS or Atom feed
A WordPress blog URL can be appended with /feed.
You can easily import RSS feeds into a Google Sheet.
CRM Data
As part of the strategic partnership between Google and Salesforce, Google developed a Sheets add-on called Data connector for Salesforce.
The add-on allows a Salesforce user to import data into one or more sheets. Based on the objects (up to 5), fields, and filters that are selected, a SOQL query is constructed. The query can be edited.
Users with appropriate permissions can update and delete records in Salesforce from a Google Sheet.
Google Analytics
Google provides an add-on for Google Sheets called GA4 Reports Builder for Google Analytics.
With this add-on, many Google Analytics dimensions and metrics can be used to pull data into Google Sheets.
Once the data are in Sheets, custom calculations can be performed.
Charts in Google Sheets derived from Google Analytics data can be embedded in Google Slides, Docs, or Sites for internal sharing and/or presentation.
Google Search Analytics
Regularly importing Google Search Analytics data into a Google Sheet using an add-on called Search Analytics For Sheets is a great way to see what actual search queries are creating impressions of on-site content in the Google search results.
When determining what keywords to optimize content for, it is helpful to understand what people are actually keying into Google Search.
For example, here is a snippet of Google Search Analytics for this site, filtered for queries that contain the word “spreadsheet.” The sheet is also sorted descending by the number of impressions.
The scheduler allows for Google Search Analytics data to be automatically pulled into Sheets at the beginning of each month.
Since formatting the raw sheet each month is repetitive, a Google Sheets macro can format and sort the new sheet with two clicks.
Securities Data
While there are plenty of online sources for viewing charts of securities data, the GOOGLEFINANCE function allows for creating customized charts.
Sheets allows for comparing two or more stocks in the same graph.
An HTML Table
The IMPORTHTML function allows for importing table data from a web page.
For some table data, finding and referencing an internal Google Sheet may be easier than finding and returning to the source page.