How to Connect Dub to Google Sheets (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Dub

You have a Google Sheet full of data — destination URLs for blog posts, campaign landing pages, product pages, partner referral links. You need short, branded Dub links created for each one, or you need click counts and targeting settings pulled back out so you can report on them. Either direction requires more steps than it should.

Dub is good at managing short links at scale: branded domains, tag hierarchies, geo-targeting, click analytics. But the bridge between your spreadsheet and Dub is a gap you have to close yourself. The default flow is exporting a CSV from Dub or manually pasting URLs one at a time into the Dub dashboard to create links — and then doing the return trip by hand when you need analytics.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default. You open your sheet, copy a destination URL, tab over to Dub, create a new link, paste the URL, configure the domain and key, copy the resulting short link, go back to your sheet, paste it into column B, and move to the next row.

That's seven steps per link.

Fine for three links. For 80 links it becomes the kind of work that makes you start checking your phone mid-task just to break the monotony. And the next time the campaign manager sends an updated URL list, you do all of it again.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Both platforms have Dub connector options. You can wire up a trigger on a new row in your sheet, call the Dub API, and write the resulting short link back into the row.

Before you start building: do you know what a trigger event is? A field mapping? An authentication token? A response body? If those terms are fuzzy, this path ends in frustration. You're better off skipping to Method 3 or 4 — there's no shame in that, and you'll save a few hours.

For those still here: the setup works. You authenticate Dub, pick your trigger (new row added, or a schedule), map the destination URL field, configure the domain and optional key, and catch the returned short URL to write back.

The structural ceiling arrives fast.

A row-by-row trigger means one API call per row. 200 URLs means 200 Zap task runs — and when row 47 fails because the destination URL has a trailing space Zapier doesn't strip, the rest of the rows may or may not continue depending on your error handling settings.

You probably just need branded short links for your URL list. You probably have no idea how to build a Zap that handles partial failures gracefully — and you shouldn't have to. So this either gets delegated to your automation person, or you run it manually anyway and the Zap sits unused.

Once you need to bulk-tag links or filter by campaign before creating them, you've outgrown what a simple row trigger can do.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable spreadsheet ↔ Dub workflows was a category of add-ons and scripts that let you configure API credentials, map columns to Dub fields, and run batches manually. You set up the template once, saved it, and hit run.

That was a real improvement over copy-pasting one row at a time. The config was reusable. The output format was consistent. Someone on the team didn't have to remember which domain and tag naming convention to use each time.

But you were still responsible for every mapping decision: which column maps to which Dub field, which domain to use, which tags to apply based on what logic. The add-on got the data through, but the judgment calls were still yours to make. And when the sheet structure changed — a column renamed, a new campaign field added — the config broke until someone went back in and manually updated it.

This is the previous generation. It got the job done, but it asked a lot of the person running it.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Google Sheets

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Dub integration it can create links, update tags, pull analytics, and write everything back to the correct columns — for you. No template configuration, no automation glue. You just describe what you need.

Example 1: Bulk-create short links for a URL list

Create a Dub short link for every URL in column A of the "Campaign URLs" tab and write the resulting short link back to column B. Use our branded domain.

Every row gets its own Dub short link created via the Dub API, and the resulting short URL lands in column B next to its source URL.

Example 2: Pull click analytics back into the sheet

For each Dub link ID in column A of my "Q2 Performance" tab, fetch the total click count and the link's expiry date, and write them into columns C and D.

The pattern: instead of exporting from Dub and then reformatting for your sheet, you ask for the pull and the write-back in one instruction. SheetXAI handles the field resolution inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a list of URLs or Dub link IDs, then ask it to create links or pull analytics. The Dub integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.