The Scenario
The paid search manager on your team built a geo-targeting experiment six months ago. It's been running fine. Now someone wants to add 15 new metro areas — cities and regions from a new international push. The campaign manager needs Autom's Google location codes for each one before the flight goes live next Monday.
The list landed in a Slack message, not a workbook. You've pasted it into column A of the 'GeoTargets' worksheet.
The bad version:
- Open Autom's location API docs, find the endpoint, write a test call for the first city, get back a paginated response with multiple matches, figure out which one is the right canonical entry
- Repeat for 15 cities, notice that "Mexico City" returns four matches with slightly different reach numbers, spend 10 minutes deciding which one to use
- Realize midway that "Bay Area" returns no exact match because it's a region, not a named Google location, and the location code needs to be looked up differently
The campaign's targeting will be wrong if even one code is off. And next Monday is not an abstract deadline.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your location names, queries Autom's Google locations endpoint for each one, and writes the location code and canonical name into the adjacent columns. You describe what you want; it handles the API mechanics.
Read the Excel table 'GeoTargets' — column A has city or region names. Look up each one in Autom's Google locations endpoint and write the location code and reach rank into the 'LocationCode' and 'Rank' columns.
What You Get
- The 'LocationCode' column populated with the Google location code for each row
- The 'Rank' column populated with Autom's reach rank for the selected match
- For ambiguous locations with multiple matches, the highest-reach result is selected automatically
- Any location that returns zero matches gets "not found" rather than a blank
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Location names are a mix of cities, metro areas, and informal region names
For each location name in column A of the 'GeoTargets' table, call Autom's location endpoint. For official city or metro area names, write the location code into 'LocationCode' and the canonical name into a 'CanonicalName' column. For informal region names that return no match, write "manual review needed" in a 'Flag' column and leave 'LocationCode' blank.
The list includes locations from multiple countries and needs to be sorted by estimated reach
Use Autom to resolve each location name in column A of the 'GeoTargets' table to its Google location code. Write the code into 'LocationCode' and the canonical name into 'CanonicalName.' Then sort the entire table by Autom's population reach value, highest first.
Location codes need to be joined with a budget allocation worksheet
Resolve each location name in column A of the 'GeoTargets' table to its Autom Google location code and write it into 'LocationCode.' Then join with the 'BudgetAllocation' worksheet on the location name column and write the corresponding budget into a new 'Budget' column.
Kill-chain: normalize, resolve, flag ambiguous, and sort by reach in one shot
Column A of the 'GeoTargets' table has location names with inconsistent formatting — some have country suffixes like "(US)" in parentheses, some are abbreviated. Strip parenthetical suffixes before querying. Use Autom to resolve each cleaned name to a Google location code. Write the code into 'LocationCode' and the canonical name into 'CanonicalName.' For any location that returns more than one match, write "ambiguous — review" into a 'Flag' column. Sort the result rows by Autom's reach value, highest first. Skip blank rows.
One prompt handles formatting, resolution, ambiguity flagging, and sorting.
Try It
Open your geo-targeting workbook and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI — then ask it to resolve your metro areas and regions to Google location codes via Autom. Also see: looking up Google country codes and the Autom hub overview.