Hello,
A while back I made a tool to sync member data to Google Sheets. You can use it for custom reporting, member data backup, or getting at fields that aren’t easy to export directly from Ghost. I mentioned it somewhere on this forum a few months ago but I just pushed some updates and figured it deserves its own thread.
- ghost-sync-google-sheets github with README
- Quick start Google Sheets template (just follow instructions in it)
Google Sheets is uhhhh not a traditional hosting platform and it has lots of quirks, but I love that it lets non-technical Ghost admins run this “for free” and control their own data and their own API keys.
Features:
- Your Google Sheet connects directly to your Ghost site.
- Can fetch attribution fields (source, UTM strings, referrer), which are really annoying to get otherwise because they are excluded from normal exports.
- Can optionally update every night on its own.
- Open source and free. And Google Sheets “hosting” is free.
Drawbacks:
- Requires the Google Sheet to know your Admin API key and someone with Edit access to the sheet might be able to extract it (See security notes in the readme)
- Initial sync is really slow if you’re also pulling attribution fields. Does about 6,000 members per hour depending how fast your Ghost site is.
- Google Sheets has execution limits and you may run into problems if you have a lot of members and a personal Google account (Google Workspace has higher limits)
I wrote a blog post about using this tool to run a “Refer A Friend” contest that awarded prizes based on the member that got the most other members to sign up each week.