Key finding
The 2026 State of PPC report found that Looker Studio and Google Sheets are tied at 51% as the most-used reporting tools among PPC professionals. Only about 6% of agencies have fully automated reporting. AI saves an average of 5.2 hours per week, but most of that time goes to ad copy and keyword research — not reporting.
The survey everyone should read
The 2026 State of PPC report surveyed 1,306 PPC professionals — the largest sample in the survey's history. It covers agencies, in-house teams, and freelancers worldwide. The reporting data buried in the results tells a story that most tool vendors would prefer you did not see.
The headline: Looker Studio and Google Sheets share first place as reporting tools at 51% each. A free Google product and a spreadsheet. That is the state of PPC reporting infrastructure in 2026.
Think about that for a moment. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in reporting SaaS, despite AI hype, despite every tool adding dashboards and automation and integrations — half of the industry is still copying numbers into a spreadsheet.
What the spreadsheet problem actually reveals
Agencies are not using spreadsheets because they love spreadsheets. They are using them because the alternatives are not good enough. The existing reporting tools have three fundamental problems:
1. Price scales the wrong way
Most reporting platforms charge per client, per dashboard, or per data source. A 20-client agency on AgencyAnalytics pays $439+/month. On DashThis, the same setup costs $339+. These costs grow every time you land a new client. Google Sheets grows at $0. For cost-conscious agencies, the math never works.
2. Charts are not reports
Every reporting tool on the market is a dashboard builder. You drag widgets, arrange charts, and set up automated sends. But what your client actually wants — a written analysis that says what happened, whether it is good or bad, and what you are doing next — is still written by hand. The tool automates the data pull. The agency still does all of the thinking.
3. Integrations break at the worst time
The #1 complaint in AgencyAnalytics G2 reviews (31 mentions) is integrations that “frequently break.” Data takes 2-3 days to fetch. Scheduled reports go out with blank sections. When your reporting tool sends a client a broken report at 7am Monday, the tool did not save you time — it created a fire drill.
AI is everywhere — except reporting
The same survey found that AI saves PPC professionals an average of 5.2 hours per week. That is real. But look at where those hours are going:
- 59%use AI for ad copy generation
- 39%use AI for keyword research
- 39%use AI for emails and proposals
- 22%use AI to build custom PPC tools (“vibe coding”)
- 21%use AI agents for workflow automation
- ~6%have fully automated reporting
AI in PPC has dropped from the #1 priority in 2024 to #3 in 2026 — behind campaign efficiency (68%) and generating conversions (59%). The hype phase is over. What matters now is whether AI actually does the work agencies need done, or just generates text that still requires human review and rewriting.
The reporting adoption gap is striking. Agencies happily use ChatGPT for ad copy because the output is good enough to use directly. They do not use AI for reporting because the output is not. A generic AI summary of campaign data — the kind AgencyAnalytics shipped in April 2026 — does not know the agency's voice, does not apply business rules, and does not deliver in a format clients trust (their account manager's email).
The measurement crisis makes reporting harder
53% of PPC professionals say measurement is less accurate than it was two years ago. The top reasons: increasingly black-box platforms (62%), less accurate attribution (53%), and increased competition (43%).
This is the hardest environment for agency reporting in a decade. Clients want clear ROI numbers. Platforms give less reliable data. And the reporting tool in the middle — whether it is a $400/month SaaS or a free spreadsheet — can only display what the platform provides. It cannot interpret it.
This is where intelligence separates from visualization. A chart showing that conversions dropped 20% is what a dashboard does. Explaining that conversions dropped because Google's attribution model changed, not because the campaign got worse, is what the agency needs to communicate. That explanation is not coming from any dashboard widget. It is either written by a human or generated by AI that understands the agency's context.
What agencies actually need from reporting
The survey data, combined with what we hear from agency owners every week, points to a short list of unmet needs:
- •Narrative, not charts. Written analysis that tells the client what happened and what it means. Not 47 widgets on a screen.
- •Agency voice, not AI voice. Reports that sound like the account manager wrote them, not a language model. Clients notice the difference immediately.
- •Business rules applied automatically.If the agency knows a new client's data should not be flagged for the first 60 days, the report should know that too. If the target CPL is $45, the report should evaluate against $45, not some generic benchmark.
- •Delivery from the agency, not the tool.Clients trust email from their account manager. They do not trust noreply@tool.com. The report should arrive from the agency's own inbox.
- •Context in a crisis.When measurement accuracy drops and platform data gets murkier, the report needs to explain what changed and why — not just show a chart with a red arrow.
The real cost of the spreadsheet stack
A 15-client agency spending 3 hours per client on reporting burns 45 hours per month. At $50/hour fully loaded, that is $2,250/month in labor on a task that does not grow the business, does not improve client outcomes, and is done from scratch every single cycle.
That is a full-time employee working a week and a half just to tell clients what already happened. Not strategizing. Not optimizing. Not selling. Just reporting.
The agencies that figure out how to reclaim those hours — without sacrificing report quality — will outpace the ones that do not. They will take on more clients, run tighter operations, and retain accounts longer because their reports actually tell a story.
Where this is heading
The PPC industry is splitting into two groups. One group is using AI where it is easy — ad copy, keyword research, quick emails — and still grinding through reporting manually. The other is starting to rethink the entire reporting workflow from the ground up.
That second group is small (around 6%) but growing. They are moving from “automate the data pull” to “automate the intelligence.” Not just getting numbers into a dashboard faster, but generating the written analysis, applying business rules, matching the agency's voice, and delivering reports that clients actually read.
Noomawas built for that second group. It generates narrative reports from Google Ads data — written in your agency's voice, with your business rules applied, delivered as drafts to your team's Gmail. Not another dashboard. Not another chart builder. The thinking layer that turns your data into the report your client actually reads.