Populating Excel with JSON data from links in cells

[denethor]

I've read dozens of examples and tried them all, can't seem to get anything working for me, so be gentle, I'm new to excel programming.
If it makes a difference, I am doing this on Excel 2011 (MAC) because the people wanting it all use macs and that may be the issue, it seems the OSX version of Excel is gimped in the vba dept.
Basically I have a sheet of URLs in column A
I have an API call I can make to those URLs that returns stats about that url in JSON.
How do I (in detail, i've never done this) make a function that will take the URL in ColumnA, append it to the end of the API link, do the GET on that, extract the JSON response and put that in ColumnB

The API link is formatted like this:
https://api-ssl.bitly.com/v3/link/clicks?access_token=PrivateToken&link=LinkfromColumnA
(I removed my oauth token and replaced with "PrivateToken")

That link returns JSON like this:
{"status_code": 200, "data": {"units": -1, "unit_reference_ts": null, "tz_offset": -4, "unit": "day", "link_clicks": 707}, "status_txt": "OK"}

All I need is the link_clicks

I made this function based off of days of reading and trying to understand.:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

How do I call it from Excel?
How do I pass the ColumnA data to the variable URL in the function?
Can I just fill down once I get the first one and it will do all the other links in the column?
I appreciate any help

[denethor]

If I try to call that function (or any function/sub with a createObject) i get an error:
Run-time error '429':
ActiveX component can't create object

[denethor]

While I would still like to know the issue as to why it won't work in excel, it took me all of 10 min to code the function in Google Docs and make it work like a champ.
Over 24hrs of banging my head to get nowhere in Excel and 10min in another IDE...