The Scenario
It's the first week of the month and your content team's monthly performance deck is due Friday. The head of marketing wants to know which of last month's article links drove the most traffic — not a gut feel, an actual number.
You have a Google Sheet with 50 short URLs in column A. The click data lives inside Shorten.REST. Between those two things is a gap you've been meaning to close with a proper report setup for three months.
The bad version:
- Log into the Shorten.REST dashboard, find the analytics section, look up the first alias in column A, note the click count, switch back to the sheet, type the number into column B.
- Repeat this 49 more times, which takes somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour depending on how fast the dashboard loads.
- Discover that two of the aliases in your sheet were deleted or renamed at some point and return no data — and now you have gaps in column B that will show up as blank cells in Friday's deck.
The deck isn't due until Friday. You have other work today. But this task has a way of expanding to fill whatever time you give it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet that reads your data and calls Shorten.REST for you — including pulling analytics for a list of aliases all at once.
Get click analytics from Shorten.REST for each alias in column A and write the total click count into column B and the most recent click date into column C. If an alias returns no data, write "not found" into column B.
What You Get
- Column B fills with the total click count for each alias.
- Column C gets the date of the most recent recorded click.
- Rows where the alias wasn't found in Shorten.REST get "not found" in column B so you can spot the gaps immediately instead of discovering them in the deck review.
- The agent tells you how many aliases returned data and how many didn't.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The aliases in column A are full short URLs, not just the slug
Column A contains full short URLs like
https://go.mycompany.com/abc123. Extract the slug from each URL, fetch the click analytics from Shorten.REST, and write the total click count into column B.
You only want data for aliases created in the last 30 days
Filter column A to only include Shorten.REST aliases where the creation date is within the last 30 days, then fetch click counts and write the results into column B. Mark any aliases created before that window as "out of range" in column B.
You need a click breakdown by day, not just a total
For each alias in column A, fetch the daily click breakdown from Shorten.REST for the past 7 days. Write the alias in column A, total clicks in column B, and the per-day breakdown as a comma-separated list in column C.
Full audit + analytics pull in one shot
Check column A for duplicate aliases and blank rows. Remove duplicates, skip blanks, then fetch Shorten.REST click analytics for all remaining aliases. Write the total click count into column B, the most recent click date into column C, and flag any aliases that returned no data in column D.
One prompt, one result — the dedup and the data pull happen together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your campaign tracking sheet with a list of short URLs in column A, then ask it to pull click counts from Shorten.REST and write them back for your report. Related: bulk-create short URLs from a sheet or audit your full alias inventory.