Whether your marketing position requires you to send invoices to clients, track website analytics, or create budget and expense reports, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself working with spreadsheets in some form.
And if you’re anything like me, those spreadsheets can feel frustratingly tedious when you’re under a time crunch.
Fortunately, Google Sheets offers 26 pre-built templates, allowing you to create reports and analyze data in spreadsheets faster and more effectively.
Best of all, Google Sheets templates cater to specific categories. For instance, if you click the Paid Traffic Report template, your spreadsheet is already organized into Overview, 12-month Trends, and Medium Breakdown categories. It knows what you need and offers it without any manual input.
Here, we'll dive into 20 of the best free Google Sheets templates for any marketing role in 2021, so you can create better spreadsheets while saving valuable time to focus on more important things — like making sense of the data itself.
Before we properly delve into the templates, let’s see why Google Sheets is an excellent choice for free templates and how you can find these templates.
Why use Google Sheets?
Google Sheets is part of Google’s G Suite of software that has over 6 million users. Here are some reasons why you should consider using it too:
1. It's free.
Even if you don’t pay for Google’s G Suite, you can still use Google Sheets and its templates for free.
2. It's easy to use.
You don’t need to pick up a manual or guide before you can start using and enjoying the features of Google Sheets and its free templates.
Since Google Sheets is cloud-based, you can work on them wherever you are or on whatever device you own as long as you have an internet connection and can access the Google account where the Google Sheet is.
3. It encourages collaboration.
Unlike with Microsoft tools, it’s easier to collaborate with Google tools like Docs and Sheets.
With a few button clicks, you can share a template or Google Sheet with other members of your team wherever they might be in the world. You can also leave comments as you and your teammates work on the same sheet in real-time.
You can also download your sheets or templates if you like.
How to Find Templates In Google Sheets
There are two common ways you can find and use free Google Sheets templates.
1. Google’s In-Built Template Gallery
On your browser, go to Google Sheets. Click “Template Gallery” at the top right. Explore the templates to find the right one for you.
You’ll find different templates for your personal, work, and project management needs. Here's an example of what the Personal template library looks like:
2. Add-Ons
Another way to find free templates in Google Sheets is to download and install the Vertex42 add-on. Here’s how:
Open an existing Google sheet, or type “
sheets.new” to create a new one. Then, find and click the “Add-ons” button on the top left menu.
Type “Vertex42” into the search bar, and click enter. Install the add-on.
To access the templates, click on “Add-ons,” then “Template Gallery for Sheets,” then “Browse Templates.”
Here you would find templates that can help with almost everything you need — whether you need to create an invoice, income/expense tracker, or a dashboard to manage your projects.
Let’s now look at some of the free Google Sheets templates you would find useful as you run your business.
20 Google Sheets Templates
Google Sheets Templates for Finances
1. Invoices
If you’re a freelancer or work for a small business, you probably use invoices to bill clients for services. This invoice template makes the process simple — it provides space for all the necessary information and looks more professional than a plain spreadsheet. Plus, the template is customizable, so you can create a theme that aligns well with your brand image.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
2. Annual Business Budget
This template is more in-depth than it initially appears. There are tabs at the bottom — setup, income, expenses, summary — and each one includes several subcategories. “Expenses,” for instance, covers everything from taxes and insurance to travel and customer acquisition.
The final tab, “summary,” takes your income, subtracts your expenses, and automatically updates to display your ending balance each month. This template is a good option if your budget requires a lot of customization and many moving parts.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
3. Financial Statements
The financial statements template truly is an all-in-one resource to keep track of business transactions, profits, and losses. The “profit & loss” tab automatically summarizes revenue, costs, and expenses for the year and can display your growth rate percentage.
If you work for a small business and need to manage much of your finances, this template offers resources and guidance to make the process easier and less prone to human error.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
4. Expense Report
Knowing how much you spend is an essential part of running a successful business. But it’s often easy to forget to record these expenses with the amount of work you have to do every day. This simple expense report template makes it super easy to record all of your expenses and those of your employees.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
5. Purchase Order
You’d find this template to be a life-saver if tracking the orders or supplies your office/department makes is part of your job. With this sheet, you can save time and avoid the headaches that come with monitoring orders or shipments.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
Google Sheet Templates for Reporting and Analytics
6. Website Traffic Dashboard
Suppose your role requires you to analyze website traffic using Google Analytics. In that case, this template is a fantastic supplemental tool to pull that data into an organized report, saving you tons of time. Better still, you can use the dashboard template with Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to monitor and analyze data from PPC, SEO, social media, and website analytics.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
7. Website Paid Traffic Report
This template makes the process of analyzing and reporting on paid traffic relatively seamless. It automatically collects data on your paid sources from Google Analytics and provides a clean chart with important information, including PPC’s percentage of goal conversions, total traffic, and bounce rate.
You can also adjust it to compare different periods or different channels or segments. If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate paid’s influence on your business, this is the tool to do it.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
Google Sheet Templates for Customers
8. CRM
To organize your contacts and automate an effective sales and marketing process, you must have a CRM — but if you’re a small company just starting, you might not feel ready to implement a fully established CRM with all the features.
This CRM template is a great place to get your feet wet. It saves automatically, so you never lose data. The share feature allows you to work with coworkers within the CRM, which helps encourage collaboration between your sales and marketing departments.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
9. Sales Dashboard
This template helps salespeople manage their leads, sales, and revenue all in one place. At the bottom of the template are different tabs where you can easily input your data that eventually shows up on the main dashboard. There’s also an “instructions” tab to get you up to speed with using the sheet.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
Google Sheet Templates for Project Management
10. Project Timeline
Whether this is your first significant project or you’ve been managing projects for years, the project timeline template is a valuable tool for organizing and implementing each project step. The template helps you visually break up a daunting project into smaller pieces, ideally making it easier and less stressful to manage and delegate tasks.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
11. Project Tracking
If you’re juggling many projects simultaneously, this project tracking template could become your new best friend. This template takes project management to the next level by enabling you to organize your tasks into categories by date, deliverables, status, cost, and hours — best of all, it lets you prioritize your projects. Hopefully, simply visualizing what needs to get done first will alleviate time-management stress.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
12. Event Marketing Timeline
The event marketing template offers organization and structure if you’re implementing an upcoming business event or campaign. It provides categories you might’ve forgotten to consider, including local and national marketing, PR, and web, with subcategories ranging from an email newsletter to impact studies.
The template is already organized with all necessary categories for planning an event, reducing the time you spend on tedious manual input.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
13. Gantt Chart Template
The Gantt chart template helps you alleviate any concern you might have over timing — and, when you’ve got a complex project with overlapping components, I’m willing to bet timing is one of your primary concerns.
Using the Gantt chart template helps you visualize all steps and delegate essential tasks more efficiently — labeling the task with an owner on one chart is undoubtedly easier than individually following up via email. And by sharing the template with coworkers, everyone is on the same page.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
14. Product Roadmap
Without a product roadmap, it’s easy for your team to misunderstand the direction you want a project to take. With this template, you can solve that problem. The template provides a calendar summary of a project and the milestones and deliverables as you go through the product development process.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
15. Product Launch Plan
This template has everything you need to organize the best product launch you’ve ever had. It has fields to help you outline your market and competitive analysis, project strategy, key messaging, and who your target audience is.
If you’re in charge of managing a product launch and want to organize the best launch ever, then this is the project management template for you.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
16. Action List With Ranking
Managing a project requires that you track daily actions to ensure you don’t lose focus. But sometimes, you’ll have some tasks on your list that are more important than others. You can easily arrange these tasks based on their importance with this action list template. You can also share this sheet with others if you’re working as a team.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
17. Project Budget
Away from the general business budget, most managers create budgets for each of their projects. This project budget template is for you if you’re looking for a simple yet effective template that lets you quickly estimate how much revenue a project would generate r how much it would cost.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
Google Sheet Templates for Leading a Team
18. Employee Shift Schedule
Keeping track of who works what hours, and how much each employee gets paid, can feel confusing, especially if you lead a team of part-time contractors or seasonal interns. This template includes slots for employee’s names, hours worked, and monthly wages, making your paycheck process straightforward and organized.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
19. Weekly Timesheet
Like the employee shift schedule, the weekly timesheet helps you track time and know how much to pay employees or subcontractors. However, the weekly timesheet template works better if you want to quickly find out how much time each employee spends on a project.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
20. Contact List
This template comes in handy if you want to create a contact list database. You can easily use the template to store your contact information (say, phone number and email address), your employees’ contact, and those of emergency services like the ambulance or fire department.
Click here to use this Google Sheets template.
Start Using These Free Google Sheets Templates
No matter what your job is, using a suitable spreadsheet would make it easier and more enjoyable.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with using these 20 free Google Sheets templates to save time, effort and improve your productivity.
