How to Connect Linkly to Excel (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Workbook Data In and Out of Linkly

You have an Excel workbook full of campaign URLs — destination links, UTM parameters, custom slugs, and a status column showing which rows are cleared for launch. Linkly is where those URLs become trackable short links. But getting them there means opening Linkly, creating each link manually, copying the generated short URL, and pasting it back into the workbook.

Linkly is good at turning URLs into trackable short links with built-in click analytics. But it was built for one link at a time, and marketing campaigns don't come in units of one.

The usual flow is: export a CSV from Linkly, manipulate it in Excel, then manually reconcile the columns with whatever is live. Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual CSV Export and Copy-Paste

Download a Linkly export as CSV, open it in Excel, copy what you need, and paste it into your workbook. For incoming data, that's the workflow. For creating new links, you're building them in Linkly one at a time and then updating the workbook by hand.

A 50-URL campaign brief means 50 round trips — open Linkly, create the link, copy the short URL, find the right row in the workbook, paste. When two of those destination URLs change after the brief is approved, you repeat the exercise for those rows and hope the workbook ends up in sync with what Linkly actually has.

Over weeks of campaign management, the workbook and Linkly drift apart. The export doesn't match the current state. Reconciliation becomes its own project.

Method 2: Power Automate

Power Automate has a Linkly connector and can trigger on changes to an Excel file or on a schedule. You can create a flow that reads from a worksheet, calls the Linkly API per row, and writes the result back.

Before you invest time here — do you know how to set up a Power Automate flow that authenticates to a third-party API? Have you built actions that loop over rows and write back to specific cells? Do you understand what happens when a row is missing a required field and the flow hits an error? If any of that sounds like foreign territory, Method 4 is where you want to be.

For those who've built Power Automate flows before: the setup involves picking the right trigger (manual, scheduled, or on file change), mapping each UTM field to the right Linkly API parameter, handling the writeback to the correct cell, and testing error conditions. The flow can work reliably once it's built.

But a row-by-row flow is not a bulk operation.

Running 80 links through a Power Automate loop means 80 individual API calls, 80 action executions, and a run history that gets hard to read quickly when one fails partway through and the rest succeed silently.

You probably just need those short URLs in column D. You probably haven't built a Power Automate flow that writes back to Excel and you shouldn't have to learn that to run a marketing campaign. So you send the request to whoever on your team handles this kind of work — and now the campaign is waiting on their backlog.

Costs on the platform also climb once you're dealing with multi-step flows across multiple campaigns.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable workbook ↔ Linkly workflows was a category of add-ons that let you save field mapping configurations. You'd define which worksheet column mapped to which Linkly parameter, save the config, and run it.

That was a meaningful step forward from CSV exports. Configs were reusable. Colleagues could re-run the same import without rebuilding it.

But you were still responsible for the mapping logic, the filter conditions, the schedule, the handling of optional fields like retargeting pixels or custom slugs. The add-on got the data through; the operational thinking stayed on you. And when the workbook structure changed — a column renamed, a new UTM field added — the config broke and sat broken until someone fixed it.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it asked a lot of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Excel

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Linkly integration it can create links, pull analytics, update destinations, and write everything back — without any template configuration or automation glue. You just ask.

Example 1: Bulk-create tracking links for a campaign launch

Create a Linkly tracking link for each row in this worksheet using the URL in column A, UTM source in column B, UTM medium in column C, and UTM campaign in column D, then write the short link into column E

SheetXAI reads every row, calls the Linkly API once per link, and writes each generated short URL back into column E — in one pass, without switching applications.

Example 2: Pull click analytics for a performance review

Export all Linkly links from my workspace and write the short URL, destination URL, click count, and creation date into this worksheet starting at row 2

The pattern: instead of downloading a Linkly CSV and reformatting it, you ask for the data in the shape you already need it. SheetXAI handles the column alignment inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with campaign URLs or Linkly link IDs, then ask it to create, update, or pull analytics on those links. The Linkly integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.