FunnelHound / Guides / vs spreadsheets
FunnelHound vs your ASO spreadsheet (RIP, little buddy)
Somewhere in your iCloud lives aso_tracking_v2_FINAL.numbers. Three beautiful weeks of data. A conversion-rate formula you were proud of. Then a launch week happened, the exports stopped, and now it's a museum. This guide is an affectionate autopsy — and an honest look at when the spreadsheet actually deserves to win.
The spreadsheet's life cycle
Week one is glorious. You export impressions from App Analytics, downloads from Sales and Trends, proceeds from Payments — three separate corners of App Store Connect, but you're motivated. Columns get named. A =C2/B2 is born and it feels like science. Week two, still going, mostly. Week three, you ship an update and forget Tuesday. Week four has one entry. The chart now has a gap that makes every trend line a lie, trust dies, and the file joins its ancestors: aso_tracking.numbers, aso_tracking_v2.numbers, and the one just called Untitled 14.
Nothing broke. The math was right the whole time. The system had a single point of failure — you, every morning, forever — and no system built on "I'll remember" survives contact with a launch week.
What the spreadsheet genuinely wins
Respect where due: for one-off custom analysis, a spreadsheet beats every dashboard ever shipped, FunnelHound included. Modeling a price change, joining App Store data with ad spend, weird cohort math nobody productized — that's spreadsheet country, and Apple's CSV exports feed it well. The spreadsheet's problem was never capability. It's that we asked a power tool to be a daily habit, and habits need to cost nothing.
What the manual system quietly costs
- The funnel math is on you. Impressions, page views, installs and money come from different reports in different units — every rate is an assembly job (the same archaeology described in FunnelHound vs App Store Connect).
- Gaps kill trust. One missed week and the chart stops being evidence. You don't act on data you suspect.
- No benchmarks. Your sheet knows your 3.4% conversion; it has no idea your category's median is 4.1% (the benchmarks guide covers what "good" is).
- Deletions never make the sheet. Nobody exports the buried deletions report by hand. It's the churn signal, and it's always missing.
- ASO changes go undated. The one annotation that matters — "changed keywords here" — lives in your memory, which is how "did it work?" becomes a shrug.
The comparison, honestly
FunnelHound is what the spreadsheet wanted to be when it grew up: the same Apple data, pulled automatically through the App Store Connect API every day, funnel pre-assembled, benchmarks drawn on the dial, deletions included, milestones instead of mental notes. No streak to maintain, no Tuesday to forget. Keep a spreadsheet for the weird deep-dive — retire it from the daily shift it never wanted.
Let the spreadsheet rest
FunnelHound feeds itself from App Store Connect daily — funnel, benchmarks, deletions, milestones. Your streak is now automatic.
Get FunnelHoundData notes: App Store Connect report locations and CSV export behavior as of August 2026. No spreadsheets were harmed in the writing of this guide; several were remembered fondly. Written by FunnelHound's developer, owner of at least four dead tracking sheets.