TrafficLane help

1. Install and open TrafficLane

1. Install TrafficLane in your Google account.
2. Google shows the permissions TrafficLane needs. If they come with checkboxes, tick every one. If one is left unticked, TrafficLane cannot read your analytics or write the tab. Why each one is needed is under Permissions.
3. Open a spreadsheet and choose Extensions → TrafficLane → Open TrafficLane. The TrafficLane panel opens on the right, with two tabs: Reports and Plan.

You need at least Viewer access to a GA4™ property, or to be a verified owner or user of a Search Console™ site. TrafficLane lists only what your Google account can already see. The reports are saved in the spreadsheet itself, so everyone who opens TrafficLane in it sees the same list.

2. The list of reports

Each report in the Reports tab shows its name and source (GA4 or Search Console), the property or site, the report and the tab it writes to, the dates (with “vs the period before” or “vs a year earlier” when it compares), its schedule and next run, and Last: when it was last refreshed and how many rows it wrote. “1,000 rows of 3,214” means Google had more rows than your row limit. A red line is the last error (see Troubleshooting); an amber line is a warning, such as a quota running low.

The buttons under a report: Refresh now, Open tab (jumps to its tab), Edit and Delete. Deleting a report stops its schedule; the tab and its data stay. With two or more reports, Refresh all refreshes them one after another. The menu Extensions → TrafficLane → Refresh all reports does the same without opening the panel.

3. Source: a GA4 property or a Search Console site

• Google Analytics 4 → Property: your properties, grouped by account. Not in the list? Open Not in the list? Type the property ID and type the numeric ID from GA4 → Admin → Property details. It is a number such as 123456789, not the G-… measurement ID.
• Search Console → Site: your verified sites. Domain properties show as “example.com (domain)”, URL-prefix properties as their address.
• Reload the list: the list is kept for 10 minutes. Press it after you get access to a new property or site.

The free plan works with one GA4™ property and one Search Console™ site per spreadsheet. Pro works with as many as your account can see.

4. Ready-made reports

“Key events” is what GA4™ used to call conversions. The Search Console™ reports are Queries, Pages, Countries (as codes such as USA), Devices and By day, each with Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Position.

Ready-made reports are sorted largest first, or by date for the reports by day, so a row limit keeps the top rows.

5. Custom reports (Pro)

• GA4™: type up to 9 Dimensions and 1 to 10 Metrics by their API names, separated by commas, such as date, sessionSourceMedium and sessions, activeUsers, keyEvents. Your own custom dimensions work too: customEvent:plan_type. Google lists the names in its GA4 Dimensions & Metrics Explorer. When you save, TrafficLane checks every name with your property and suggests the closest one for a typo. Sort by takes one of the names, High → low or Low → high; left empty, the first metric is sorted high to low.
• Search Console™: under Group by, tick any of date, query, page, country and device.

6. Filters

• GA4™, Only rows where (optional): a dimension of the report, such as the page path, that contains, begins with, is exactly or doesn't contain a text. It is not case-sensitive. A report grouped only by date has nothing to filter by.
• Search Console™: Page contains and Query contains (both must match when you fill in both), and Search type: Web, Image, Video or News.

7. Dates

• Last 7, 28 or 90 days: the full days before today. Today is not complete yet, so it is left out.
• Last month: the whole previous calendar month.
• Month to date and Year to date: from the 1st of the month, or from January 1, to today so far.
• Custom dates: a start and an end date.

“Today” is in the time zone set under Plan → Settings (the spreadsheet’s own zone unless you change it), or in the report’s own schedule time zone. Search Console™ data of the last two or three days is still being collected and can change.

8. Compare with an earlier period (Pro)

Under Compare with, choose The previous period or The same dates a year earlier. For every number, two columns are added: the earlier value, such as “Views (earlier)”, and the change. Counts show the change in percent (“Views Δ%”: +12.5%). Rates and positions show the plain difference (“Engagement rate Δ”, “Position Δ”); for position, lower is better. A change from zero is left blank.

“The previous period” is the month before for Last month, the same days of the month before for Month to date, the same dates a year earlier for Year to date, and otherwise the same number of days just before. Rows are matched by their values, the same page, query or country; days are matched by their place in the period. A row that is new has no earlier value, and a row that existed only earlier is not shown.

9. Where it goes: the report tab

• Tab: the tab the report writes to. Left empty, TrafficLane names it for you, such as “GA4 Top pages – Example Store”. Changing the name later renames the tab, and if you rename the tab in Sheets, TrafficLane still finds it.
• TrafficLane replaces everything in this tab on each refresh. Put charts and formulas in another tab that points to it. It will not write to a tab that already holds data it did not write, or to another report’s tab.
• Rows, at most: 1 to 25,000, 1,000 unless you change it.
• Name in this list: how the report is called in the panel.

In the tab, row 1 is a bold, frozen header and the numbers carry their formats: thousands, percent and dates. Two columns to the right of the table is a note: “Updated time by TrafficLane”, the source and report, the dates (and the compared dates), the filter, the number of rows, and any remark from Google, such as sampling, data thresholds or an “(other)” row. Search queries and page names that start with =, +, − or @, or look like numbers or dates, are written as text, never as formulas.

10. Schedules (Pro)

Under Schedule, choose Every day, Every week (tick the days), or Every month on a day from 1 to 28 or the last day. Around is the hour, and Time zone is the one from Settings or one of its own. By hand only (Refresh now) turns the schedule off.

The refresh runs from your account within that hour, even when the spreadsheet is closed: one hourly check in your account refreshes whatever is due. Saving a schedule does not refresh at once; it waits for the next time. If a run was missed, for example during a Google outage, the next hourly check catches up once. A spreadsheet’s schedules run from one account at a time, so nothing is refreshed twice.

11. The Plan tab and the run log

• Your plan: Free or Pro, the buy links, and Already paid? Activate.
• Settings → Time zone for dates and schedules.
• Keep a log of every refresh in a “TrafficLane log” tab (Pro): the time, report, source, how it ran (scheduled, Refresh now or Refresh all), rows and the result. About the last 1,000 lines are kept.
• Disconnect this spreadsheet: deletes TrafficLane’s reports in this spreadsheet and stops their schedules. The tabs and their data stay.

12. Free and Pro

• Free: up to 3 reports per spreadsheet, one GA4™ property and one Search Console™ site, every ready-made report, any dates, filters, up to 25,000 rows, Refresh now and Refresh all.
• Pro: $4.99 a month or $39 a year, for daily, weekly and monthly refreshes, up to 30 reports per spreadsheet, as many properties and sites as your account can see, comparisons with an earlier period, custom GA4™ reports and the run log tab.

Pro is bought from the panel’s Plan tab, with Paddle as our Merchant of Record. The checkout is filled in with your Google account email, and after you pay, Pro switches on by itself in the open panel, usually within a minute. Paid with a different email? Open Already paid? Activate and enter the email you used at checkout. One subscription is for one Google account, in every spreadsheet.

Cancel any time from the link in your Paddle receipt, or by emailing info@bilingoplus.com. Pro then runs to the end of the period you paid for. Every charge has a 14-day refund (see refunds). If Pro ends, nothing is deleted: schedules pause, and reports that use Pro features (a comparison, a custom report, a second property or site, more than 3 reports) say “Needs Pro” and cannot be refreshed by hand until you edit them to fit the free plan or renew.

13. Permissions

When you install TrafficLane, Google may list each permission with a checkbox. Tick all of them. If one is left unticked, TrafficLane says in its panel which one is missing: press Give the missing permissions, tick every box on Google’s screen, then close the panel and open TrafficLane again.

Why “all your spreadsheets”? Google’s narrower “this spreadsheet only” permission covers the spreadsheet you are working in. Scheduled refreshes (Pro) run from a timer while the spreadsheet is closed, and that permission gives a timer no spreadsheet to open. So TrafficLane asks for Google’s spreadsheets permission, which Google’s screen words as “See, edit, create and delete all your Google Sheets spreadsheets”. Google does not narrow it further; TrafficLane’s own code does. It writes only to its own report tabs, and the hourly check opens only the spreadsheets where you set up a schedule. It never creates or deletes a spreadsheet.

TrafficLane has no Google Drive™ or Gmail™ permission, and none of its permissions is a “restricted” Google permission.

14. Troubleshooting

A failed refresh shows as a red line under the report in the panel, and as a “Last refresh failed …” line under the note in the tab. The last good data stays.

15. Your data

TrafficLane runs inside your Google account. Report data goes from Google Analytics™ and Search Console™ straight into your spreadsheet; nothing from your analytics or your spreadsheets is sent to BiLingoPlus. The setup is saved inside the spreadsheet, and a small record for your account (the Pro status and which spreadsheets have schedules) in your Google account. Erase my data, at the bottom of the panel, deletes what TrafficLane keeps for your account and stops your scheduled refreshes; reports saved in spreadsheets and their tabs stay. Details are in the privacy policy.

16. Still stuck?

Write to info@bilingoplus.com or use the support page. Tell us the message you see in the panel or in the tab’s note. Please do not send us your analytics data or a spreadsheet with private details in it.

TrafficLane — GA4 & Search Console to SheetsGA4™ and Search Console™ reports in a sheet, refreshed on a schedule

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