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 sheet. What you don't have is the traffic from each source, which lives inside Plausible. The two datasets have never been in the same room.
The bad version:
- Open Plausible, find the Sources breakdown, screenshot the top sources — then remember you need the numbers, not a picture.
- Try the CSV export, which gives you source name, visitors, and bounce rate in one file — but 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, then paste the visitors column next to your spend data, realize the sort order doesn't align, and do a VLOOKUP you have to re-explain to yourself every time you build it.
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 inside your Google Sheet. It connects to Plausible's sources breakdown and writes the results directly into your sheet — no CSV cleanup, no manual source-matching.
Open the Channels sheet and run this prompt:
Query Plausible for a top-sources breakdown for the past 30 days and write source name (A), visitors (B), and bounce rate (C) into the Referrers sheet
What You Get
- Column A: source name as Plausible reports it (e.g., google, linkedin.com, newsletter-domain.com)
- Column B: unique visitors attributed to that source
- Column C: bounce rate for visitors arriving from that source
- Rows sorted descending by visitors, all sources included — not just the top 10
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want more metrics per source — pageviews and average visit duration
Query Plausible for all referrer sources for the last 30 days and write source (A), visitors (B), pageviews (C), and average visit duration in seconds (D) into the Referrers sheet — sort descending by visitors
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 tab where column A is the Plausible source name and column B is my internal channel label
You want to filter to only the 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
Pull source data, join it to spend, calculate CPC, 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 sheet — then in column C do a VLOOKUP against the Channels sheet 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 pattern: data pull, join, calculation, and annotation all at once — ready to drop into a slide before Thursday.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a Google Sheet that has your channel spend data — or just a blank Referrers tab — 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.