The Scenario
Budget review is this Thursday. You've been running paid campaigns on three channels — Google, LinkedIn, and a newsletter sponsorship — and your boss wants to know which one is actually driving traffic versus burning money.
You have the spend data already in column C of your Channels worksheet. What you don't have is the traffic from each source, which lives inside Plausible. The two datasets have never been in the same workbook.
The bad version:
- Open Plausible, find the Sources breakdown, export the CSV, open it in Excel — and find the source names don't match your campaign labels (Google Ads shows up as google, your newsletter shows up as the newsletter domain).
- Spend 20 minutes hand-matching sources to your internal channel names, paste the visitors column next to your spend data, and discover the sort order doesn't align.
- Build a VLOOKUP to join the two datasets, which works until one source name has a trailing space or slightly different capitalization, breaking the match silently.
Thursday is two days away. You still haven't started the slide deck.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It connects to Plausible's sources breakdown and writes the results directly into your worksheet — no CSV cleanup, no manual source-matching.
Open the Channels worksheet and run this prompt:
Pull all referrer sources from Plausible for the last 30 days and write source (A), visitors (B), pageviews (C), and average visit duration (D) into this Excel sheet — sort descending by visitors
What You Get
- Column A: source name as Plausible reports it
- Column B: unique visitors attributed to that source
- Column C: total pageviews from that source
- Column D: average visit duration in seconds for visitors from that source
- All sources included, sorted by visitors descending
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need to match Plausible source names to your internal channel labels
Query Plausible for referrer sources over the last 30 days — write source name (A) and visitors (B) — then in column C do a VLOOKUP against the Channel Map worksheet where column A is the Plausible source name and column B is my internal channel label
You want to filter to sources where bounce rate is under 50%
Query Plausible for all sources for the last 30 days — write source (A), visitors (B), bounce rate (C) — then in column D flag any source where bounce rate is below 0.50 with the label High quality, and leave the rest blank
You want to add a conversion count per source from a goal query
Query Plausible for top referrer sources for the last 30 days — write source (A), visitors (B) — then also query goal completions per source for the same period and write completions in column C, and calculate conversion rate in column D as completions divided by visitors
Pull source data, join it to spend, calculate cost per visitor, and flag inefficient channels in one shot
Query Plausible for top referrer sources for the last 30 days — write source (A) and visitors (B) into the Referrers worksheet — then in column C VLOOKUP against the Channels worksheet to pull the spend figure for that source, in column D calculate cost per visitor as C divided by B, and in column E flag any row where cost per visitor exceeds 5 with the label Review
The data, joined and annotated, before Thursday's deadline.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook that has your channel spend data — or just a blank Referrers worksheet — then ask it to pull your Plausible source breakdown alongside it. For related reads, see the hub overview or the spoke on UTM campaign performance.