A live data lane allows you to connect a step to an external source of data like a Google Spreadsheet. You are able to connect each step of a journey map to a Google Spreadsheet to automatically visualize any numerical data such as revenue, churn, conversion, satisfaction scores, NPS, etc.

What is live data lane?

Your external document is parsed and visualized in the journey map. As an example, you can use this lane to integrate your own metrics and display them along the experiences of your personas. There are many tools out there to update Google Spreadsheets automatically from sources such as Google Analytics, Typeform, or MailChimp through services like Zapier.

Live data lane is available for Business, Enterprise plans and during the trial period.

Follow this three easy steps to create your own live data lane:

  1. add a new lane
  2. authorize your Google account
  3. convert your spreadsheet


Create a live data lane

Click on the "add lane" button and select live data on the lane menu.


In order to use the live data lane, first you need to authorize with Google Drive. You only need to do this once by connecting Google Drive account to your Smaply account. After you authorize your account you are able to link spreadsheet to your lane in any of your projects and organizations. Please note that a Google account can only be connected to 1 Smaply user.


Then you can upload your own Google Sheets or take a look at our example spreadsheet to see how to format your Excel in a best way to use it for live data lane. Please make sure that your spreadsheet follows this specific format in order to work.

Before you choose your spreadsheet, make sure your file has one header row and one header column. 

Please note that you need to convert Excel files to Google Sheets to make them work.


After you uploaded a Google Sheet and created that step, you can edit field settings by clicking on the cogwheel on the top right corner. Also you can update your data by choose "re-fetch data" and your spreadsheet will be automatically updated. 

You can delete your data from the step by clicking on the cogwheel on the top right and choose "remove data".

Authorization process

What happen with your data after you authorized with Google:

  • when you click on authorization with Google, no data will be fetched
  • after the authorization process, you get a file picker: this file picker runs completely on your (the users) side(!), and Smaply does not see or fetch ANY data.
  • in theory Smaply could fetch any data the user has access to, but its like with charging customers on their credit card: we simply don't do it!
  • after you pick a file in the file picker, we are fetching the data of the selected file (nothing else), but not saving any content: we are just passing the data back to you (browser), to enable you selecting the columns and number of rows which Smaply should fetch/save.
  • after you confirm the selected columns and the number of rows (in the live-data sidebar), Smaply fetches and saves exactly and only the selected(!) columns and number of rows.
  • if you delete the live-data field or lane, all the data is deleted on Smaply side


Delete spreadsheet and unauthorize your account

You can delete your spreadsheet by deleting your Google Sheet from your Google Drive.

If you don't want to use live data lane anymore then just drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll unauthorize your account.


"File cannot be found" error message on the sidebar

When you cannot re-fetch data anymore or the editing field settings doesn't work then please check if your Google Sheets are still available in your Google Drive.

The reasons to get "File cannot be found" error message on the sidebar are:

  • your file might be deleted in Google Drive
  • your file might be unshared with you through Google Drive
  • you might have revoked access to Google Drive for Smaply


After you checked your Google Drive and your live data lane still not working please contact us via [email protected] and we'll look into this.