Data is essential for effective marketing. It helps marketers identify problems and opportunities and provides the insights necessary to solve them. Google Sheets is one of the best tools available for storing data and tracking performance metrics. But are you using this powerful tool to its full potential?
In this article, marketers share the tool's most valuable feature for enhancing their productivity. These tips can help you get the most out of this powerful tool and make your data-driven marketing more effective.
The features shared include:
If you still need to use Google Sheets, now is the time to start. Its powerful features and ease of use make it an essential tool for any data-driven marketer.
Data Validation Feature
With data validation, checking data for accuracy and completeness is simple and quick. You can use this feature to enforce rules on the data in your spreadsheets, preventing mistakes and ensuring that the data is entered correctly. In addition, you can control the format of the data entered into your spreadsheet by creating input masks and drop-down lists. So let's say your customer is a real estate company with multiple locations. If that's the case, data validation is a simple method for managing multiple marketing campaigns without clogging up your data.
Chris Gadek, Head of Growth, AdQuick
Integration With Other Apps Using Zapier
Google Sheets can be easily integrated with over 1,000 apps using Zapier. This opens up a whole world of possibilities for marketers who want to automate their workflows and get more done in less time. The most useful integrations for marketers include apps like SocialBee, Hootsuite, and Buffer. Marketers can use this integration to automate tasks like adding new leads to a mailing list or scheduling social media posts.
Michal Jonca, Outreach Specialist, PhotoAiD
ISEMAIL Feature
A critical part of effective marketing is keeping your data current which is why every marketer needs to know about the Google Sheets ISEMAIL email validation feature. Having emails bounce back does little to aid promotional efforts, and sending emails to incorrect addresses can actually hurt them. ISEMAIL ensures that your lists are current by quickly identifying invalid emails, reducing the chances of sending emails to non-participating recipients, and ensuring that marketing reports are more concise and accurate. Because managing email data can be the difference between a successful campaign and a flop, every marketer should know the Google Sheets’ ISEMAIL feature.
Cody Candee, Founder and CEO, Bounce
Limit the Editability of Certain Cells
Every marketer needs to know that they can restrict the editability of specific cells, especially volatile sections, in Google Sheets. When multiple people are working on a single spreadsheet, mistakes will happen. Accidents affect the values subsequently, especially if you have interconnected Google Sheets. Limiting editable cells ensures the safety and integrity of all data. Otherwise, you risk losing vital data when someone makes a simple mistake. Although it is possible to recover any mistake, it is better to prevent them. Doping so streamlines the process of collaborating together. If there's a mistake that needs fixing, this will stop other people from working if the issue is still being fixed.
Tristan Buenconsejo, Founder and Managing Director , TriBu LinkBuilding
ImportHTML
One Google Sheets function that can be especially helpful for marketers is ImportHTML. This simple formula allows you to import useful data from websites, like tables and lists. For example, you can import contact lists, calendars with key dates, or any critical onpage data that would be useful to have in spreadsheet form. You simply apply the ImportHTML function in Google Sheets, and boom, in comes the HTML. For marketing purposes, this is awesome for generating email lists and building campaign schedules. To be totally fair, you often have to do a little cleanup, but it can save tons of time over copying and pasting.
John Ross, Chief Executive Officer, Test Prep Insight
The Filter Feature
Oftentimes, spreadsheets display multiple levels of information. However, if you want to focus on a certain group, the Filter feature in google sheets makes the process simple. By selecting the filter option and creating a filter view, you can exclude certain columns and rows so that you can efficiently target certain aspects of the data. This is great for marketing campaigns and follow up emails to help keep track of when data is being pushed out and to where.
Gregg Dean, Co-Founder and CEO, Layla Sleep
Translate Right Inside Google Sheets
Google has a little-known feature that allows you to translate right inside Google sheets! For marketers working on multilingual campaigns, such as international SEO strategies, this can save lots of time over copy and pasting into Google Translate.
Simply make a new column and add the formula below:
=GoogleTranslate(A2, "es", "en")
A2 is the cell that contains the value you want to translate; the 2nd entry is the source language and the 3rd entry is the language you want to translate into. If you just want to detect what language a call value is in, you can use the formula below:
=DetectLanguage(A2)
Find more info here: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093331 https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093278
Max Peters, SEO Consultant, International SEO Consultant
The Dynamic Form Add-on
One of the most powerful features is the ability to automatically update data in one sheet from another sheet in the same or a different Google Sheets file. This is done by using a Google Sheets add-on called Dynamic Form. A Dynamic Form allows you to enter data in one sheet and have it automatically update in other sheets within the same or different files. You can also update data in one sheet from another sheet by using Google Sheets formulas.
Admir Salcinovic, Co-Founder, Pricelisto
Hide Cell Gridlines
I work with Google Sheets on a daily basis and I just recently learned a styling tip from a colleague which beautifies my table.
If you would like to put the center of attention on your dashboard/table, hide all the other cells. You can do this as follows:
1. Click the View option in the menu 2. Click on Show 3. Deactivate Gridlines
Corina Burri, SEO Consultant, Corina Burri
Conditional Formatting and Pivot Tables
There are a lot of great features in Google Sheets that can help you become a more efficient marketer. Here are two that I think are particularly useful:
1. Conditional formatting: This feature allows you to change the color or font of cells based on their values, so you can easily identify outliers or patterns in your data. For example, if you have a column for "hours worked," you could make the cell turn red if it's over 40 hours. That way, if someone worked more than 40 hours last week, you'll know immediately when you look at their row.
2. Pivot tables: A pivot table is a summary of data based on certain columns—for instance, it can show sales figures by region or product type. If you're tracking something like sales by region and want to see how each region is performing compared to its target goal, this is a great way to do it
Amer Hasovic, Content Writer, Love & Lavender
Conclusion
Google Sheets is a powerful tool that can help you streamline your marketing tasks. With the proper knowledge, you can use it to its full potential for data analysis, email list management, and more.
Have you tried out any of these features? Are there any other Google Sheet features you’d like to learn about? Let us know in the comments!