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

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Linkly

You have a Google Sheet full of campaign URLs — destination links, UTM parameters, custom slugs, and maybe a column flagging which ones are ready to go live. Linkly is where those URLs become trackable short links. But getting them there means opening Linkly, creating each link one at a time, copying the generated short URL, and pasting it back into the sheet.

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: download a Linkly export, wrestle it into shape in the sheet, then manually reconcile the columns. Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

Open Linkly, create each tracking link by hand, copy the short URL, switch back to the sheet, paste it into the right row. Repeat for every URL in the campaign.

For a five-link test, this takes three minutes. For a 50-ad launch — where each row has its own UTM source, UTM medium, UTM campaign, and a custom slug — you're looking at an afternoon of switching tabs, copy-pasting, and hoping you didn't mix up rows 34 and 35.

Then the campaign brief changes. Two destination URLs need updating. You go back into Linkly, find the right links, make the changes, copy the new short URLs, and update the sheet again. The sheet is never quite in sync with what's actually live in Linkly. That lag is where reporting errors come from.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Both platforms have a Linkly connector. You can wire up a trigger on a new row in the sheet, call the Linkly API to create a link, and write the short URL back into another column.

Before you decide whether this is your path — do you know what a webhook trigger looks like? Have you mapped fields between two API connectors before? Do you know what to do when a field type mismatch causes a Zap to fail silently at row 12? If those concepts feel unfamiliar, skip ahead to Method 3 or 4. You'll get there faster.

For those still here: the setup is real and it works. But it takes picking the right trigger (row added? row updated? a status column changes to "ready"?), mapping every UTM field by hand, dealing with Linkly's API response shape, and writing the short URL back into the correct column. When it works, it's satisfying. When it breaks, you're in Zap history at midnight.

But the deeper problem is structural.

A trigger-per-row automation is not a bulk operation. Fifty URLs means fifty separate Zap executions, fifty API calls, and fifty individual entries in your task history. Debug a failure at row 27 and you're scrolling through 26 successful entries to find the one that silently errored.

You probably just need the short URLs written into column E. You probably have no idea how to build a Make scenario that maps six UTM parameters per row and handles the writeback — and you shouldn't have to. So you push this to whoever on your team handles automations, and now you're waiting on a Slack reply while the campaign launch date approaches.

Cost also compounds once you're running this for multiple campaigns. Task counts add up faster than they appear to when you're setting up the scenario.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable spreadsheet ↔ Linkly workflows was a category of add-ons that let you manually configure field mappings and saved templates. You'd specify the column for destination URL, the column for UTM source, the column for custom slug — save the config, run the import.

That was a real step up from copy-paste. Configs were reusable. The team didn't have to reformat data every run.

But you were still responsible for the template design, the field mapping, the logic about which rows to include, the handling of optional fields like retargeting pixels. The add-on moved the data through; the thinking was still yours. And when your sheet added a new UTM column or renamed one, the config broke and stayed broken until someone went back in and fixed it manually.

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

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 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 sheet 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, with no switching tabs.

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 sheet starting at row 2

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

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet 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.