5 Excel Formulas Every Digital Marketer Should Know

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You don’t need to be a spreadsheet wizard to run great reports. You need five formulas and the discipline to keep your data clean. Here they are.

1. XLOOKUP — join your data

The modern replacement for VLOOKUP. Pull spend from one sheet into your conversions sheet by campaign name:

=XLOOKUP(A2, Spend!A:A, Spend!B:B, 0)

It searches in any direction, returns a default when there’s no match, and doesn’t break when you insert columns.

2. SUMIFS — spend by segment

Total spend for one campaign, one month, one channel — all at once:

=SUMIFS(Spend, Campaign, "Brand", Month, "January")

This is the backbone of almost every paid-media pivot you’ll ever build.

3. ROAS in one cell

Return on ad spend is just revenue over cost — but wrap it to avoid dividing by zero:

=IFERROR(Revenue / Spend, 0)

4. TEXT — clean UTM and date formatting

Turn a raw date into a clean month label for grouping:

=TEXT(A2, "mmm yyyy")

5. IF + AND — flag what needs attention

Automatically highlight campaigns that are spending but under-performing:

=IF(AND(Spend>100, ROAS<1), "Review", "OK")

The real skill

Formulas are the easy part. The hard part is consistent naming: name campaigns, sheets and columns the same way every time, and every formula above just works. Build the habit once and your reports stop fighting you.