For data-driven marketers, maintaining fresh data across hundreds or thousands of pages of content can be a pretty tall task. Maybe you’re scraping it from several sources, you have custom calculations, or it changes very frequently (or all of the above). This plugin can help you push out unique, fresh data to all of our pages at any time you want. And yes, you can use formulas.
Let’s use a fan merchandise site as an example (sample spreadsheet).
I’m a big NASCAR fan, so let’s say you sell NASCAR merchandise. You organize your merch by drivers and by tracks, so you have category pages for drivers like Chase Elliott and tracks like Charlotte Motor Speedway.
For drivers, you know more wins sells more merch. So, on each driver page, you want to show statistics about how many wins they have in recent years.
For tracks, you want to show who the most recent winner is and a leaderboard of the stock car manufacturers (Ford, Chevrolet, Toyota) by number of wins.
With a race every week for the majority of the year and ~40 drivers per race, sounds like kind of a hassle to keep updated, right?
With the sheet.codes plugin, you can simplify the process of getting valuable data-driven content from its rawest form to your WordPress pages.
In the spreadsheet linked above, you can see there is a tab called “rawdata” which is a download of the latest NASCAR Cup Series race results from the last 2 years. There are also two other tabs, “drivers” and “tracks” that are summaries of that raw data that you can populate on your category pages.,
In those summary tabs, there are formulas like VLOOKUP(), AVERAGEIF(), MAXIFS(), etc. that transform the raw data into the data points that you want for your category pages for drivers and tracks.
So, if you want to display the number of wins that Chase Elliott has at the top of his merchandise category page, simply enter a shortcode in that field of your WordPress editor that references his row and the “totalwins” column.
As new raw data is entered into the spreadsheet every week with race results, the calculations (and your category pages) automatically update.
There are a lot of possibilities for displaying data-driven, formula-driven content with sheet.codes. Have any other examples? Let me know.
