TL;DR
- The three classic options — PDF exports, granting ad account access, and Looker Studio — trade your time, your control, and your setup effort respectively.
- A shareable live link is the sweet spot: the client sees current numbers, you keep the account locked down, and Friday stops being export day.
- In Adstudio you share a dashboard as a link — public or password-protected, expiring in 24 hours, 7 days, or never — and it always shows live data.
Client reporting has a dirty secret: much of "reporting" time isn't analysis, it's packaging. The numbers exist; the work is exporting, screenshotting, pasting into slides, and emailing — then doing it again next week because the numbers moved. Meanwhile the client's actual need is simple: "let me peek at how my ads are doing without asking you."
The default. Export charts, assemble the deck, write commentary, send.
The honest case for it: commentary. A deck forces you to say what the numbers mean, which is most of an agency's value. Don't lose that.
The case against: the packaging time (typically an hour+ per client per week), and staleness — the report describes last week, and the client's inevitable "what about today?" restarts the loop. Keep the commentary; automate the numbers.
Google and Meta both support read-only account access, and it's free.
Right for you if: the client is genuinely ads-literate and you have nothing to smooth over — some sophisticated clients rightly insist on it.
Wrong for most cases: Ads Manager is an expert interface. A client who doesn't live in it will find the scariest possible number (view-through attribution, the one paused campaign, spend without the matching revenue view) and call you about it. You've traded reporting time for support time — and shown them your entire account structure, including test campaigns and every historical experiment. Also: it's per-platform, so a Google + Meta + TikTok client needs three accesses and still can't see the blended picture.
A shared Looker Studio report is a real solution — live, free to view, fully customizable. The costs are upfront and ongoing: paid connectors for Meta/TikTok data (roughly $30–150+/month), the build itself, and maintenance when connectors or campaign structures change. Agencies with a reporting specialist do excellent client dashboards this way. If that's not who you are, the build never quite gets finished.
Adstudio's version: you already have a cross-platform dashboard (Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, GA4 widgets in one view — built like this). Sharing it is one dialog:
useadstudio.com/dashboard/shared/….What the client sees is the dashboard with live data — the same numbers you see, fetched fresh when they open it. No login, no account access, no Ads Manager confusion, and the link shows exactly the widgets you chose to include: your test campaigns and internal experiments stay yours.
Custom reports have the same trick with tighter defaults — report share links are always password-protected and expire after 24 hours, which fits "here's the deep-dive we discussed on the call" better than a standing dashboard. Media plans can be shared for client sign-off too, with comments.
Report and dashboard sharing is included from the $19/month plan up; agencies typically pair it with one workspace per client on the Business plan ($39/workspace/month) so each client's connections, dashboards, and links stay cleanly separated. Pricing here.
Is a public share link safe for client data? "Anyone with the link" means exactly that — treat the URL as a credential and use password protection plus expiry for sensitive accounts. The meaningful comparison isn't against perfection; it's against the status quo of PDFs forwarded around inboxes, which have no expiry and no revocation at all.
Can I revoke a link after sending it? Yes — revoking invalidates the token immediately, including "never expires" links. That's the practical difference from an emailed export: you can un-share a link; you can't un-send an attachment.
Will the client see live or cached numbers? Live — shared dashboards fetch current data when opened. Expect the usual platform reporting delays (ad platforms restate recent hours), which affect every tool equally.
Should the live dashboard replace my weekly report email? Keep both, but shrink the email: link to the dashboard for numbers, and spend the saved packaging time on three sentences of commentary about what changed and what you're doing about it. The dashboard answers "what"; you get paid for "so what."
Feature descriptions reflect Adstudio and the platforms as of July 2026.