Which Google Ads reporting tool do you need for client reports?

Alex Black

Co-Founder / CEO

For one client’s Google Ads, you don’t need to pay for a reporting tool. Looker Studio is free, it comes with Google’s own Google Ads connector, and a client can open a report you share without a Google Ads login. Pay when you report on several clients or put Google Ads next to other sources, and want every report current each morning without touching it. Then a Google Sheets connector like SyncWith does the job from $24.99 a month.

When agencies switch to us from Supermetrics, I think the reason is mostly price. Free is the best price there is, so start there.

What kinds of Google Ads reporting tools are there?

Google makes three of them, and all three are free. The fourth is ours: SyncWith, a connector that pulls your accounts into Google Sheets for you. One naming note: Google renamed Looker Studio to Data Studio in April 2026. This page still says Looker Studio, but Data Studio is the name you’ll see when you open it.

Google emails scheduled reports only to people with access to the account’s reports, and manager account reports can also go to people with email-only access. Either way, your client gets a file, not a report that updates in front of them.

Which one fits how many clients you report on?

• One client, Google Ads only. Build the report in Looker Studio with Google’s connector, and set the data source to use your own login. Then your client doesn’t need one.
• You work in Google Sheets, one account at a time. Google’s free add-on schedules a report into a sheet. Only the Google account that made a report can refresh it.
• Several clients, other sources, or a teammate outside the US (Google’s add-on works only in the US). This is where SyncWith pays for itself. Connect a manager account and every client under it comes along, including clients you add later. Facebook Ads, Google Analytics and Shopify can sit in the same workbook, and you can build the client’s dashboard in Looker Studio on top of the sheet.

We’ve compared Google’s add-on and SyncWith side by side on our Google Ads to Google Sheets page, and the setup is in our guide to exporting Google Ads to Google Sheets.

How many refreshes does a Google Ads client report use?

A report that refreshes once a day uses about 30 refreshes a month. A refresh is one run that pulls new data into your report. We count refreshes, not clients or ad accounts: a report that covers a whole manager account uses one refresh per run.

People refresh more than you’d guess. In Q3 2026, the 12,367 Google Ads reports that ran in SyncWith refreshed 2,084,549 times between them: about 169 each, close to two a day. That’s more per report than Facebook Ads (about 102) or Google Analytics (about 47). Daily is also the schedule people pick most: 55.8% of scheduled SyncWith reports, across all sources. So pick a tool that can refresh itself every day.

So the Business plan, $24.99 a month for 100 refreshes, covers three daily client reports, or one daily report for every client under your manager account. The free Hobby plan’s 35 refreshes run one daily client report for about a month, so you can try it on a real client first.

How do you track Google Ads budget pacing for every client?

This is what a sheet that refreshes every morning is good for. Give each client one row and you can see, before your first call, who’s spending ahead of their budget and who’s behind.

Column D is the budget times the days finished so far, divided by the days in the month.

Say a client’s budget is $3,000 and it’s October 15. Fourteen of 31 days are done, so they should have spent about $1,354.84. If they’ve spent $1,500, the pace is 111%: on track to go over unless you pull back. Don’t panic over a single day, though: Google lets a campaign spend up to twice its average daily budget on one day, but over a month it won’t spend more than 30.4 times the daily budget.

Pace on spend, not conversions. Google counts a conversion on the day of the click, so last week’s numbers can still go up this week. Google also says reporting lags can take up to 24 to 48 hours.

What goes in the monthly Google Ads client report?

Keep it short enough that a client reads all of it:

• Two sentences on top: what happened this month and what you’ll do next.
• Spend, conversions, and cost per conversion or ROAS against the client’s target. Our ROAS calculator and CPC calculator show the math if a client asks.
• Campaigns, with their spend and results.
• The search terms that spent the most.
• Devices and locations, if they changed.

If the same client also runs Meta ads, the report has the same shape. Our Meta Ads reporting guide covers the parts that work differently there.

Other questions about Google Ads reporting

How do I do a Google Ads report?

In Google Ads, open Campaigns, then Insights & reports, then Report editor. Pick a table or a chart, add the columns you want, and save it. From there you can download it or schedule it to go out by email.

Is $10 a day good for Google Ads?

A $10 daily budget is about $304 a month. Whether that’s enough depends on what a click costs you: at $2 a click, it buys about 150 clicks a month. Work out your cost per click with our CPC calculator.