Google Ads Report: What to Include, How to Build It, and the 2026 Changes That Break Old Templates
Seven sections, one place to build them, and three changes Google made this year that leave an old monthly template producing numbers that look fine and are not.
A Google Ads report is the monthly page that says what the account spent, what that spend bought, and what you changed because of it. A useful one has seven sections: headline numbers, campaign performance with CPA and ROAS, search terms, auction insights, device and location, Performance Max channels and products, and a short note on what changed. You build it in Google Ads’ Report editor, download it as CSV, Excel or a Google Sheet, and schedule it so next month’s data arrives without anyone asking.
Below: what goes in each section, how to build and schedule it, a template you can copy, and the three 2026 changes that quietly broke a lot of old monthly templates — with dates, from Google’s own documentation.
What a Google Ads report should include
| Section | The question it answers | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Headline numbers | Did we spend what we planned, and what did it buy? | Account totals: cost, conversions, conversion value |
| 2. Campaign performance | Which campaigns earn their budget? | Campaigns table, with CPA and ROAS computed from totals |
| 3. Search terms | What were people actually typing? | Insights and reports → Search terms |
| 4. Auction insights | Who else is in our auctions, and are we losing ground? | Campaigns → select → Auction insights |
| 5. Device and location | Where does performance differ enough to act on? | Device and location segments in Report editor |
| 6. Performance Max detail | Which channels and products the money went to | Channel performance page, Products tab |
| 7. What changed, what we did | Why the numbers moved, and the response | You |
Headline numbers and campaigns
Cost, conversions, conversion value, CPA and ROAS for the month, beside last month and the same month last year. Then one row per campaign, sorted by cost rather than ROAS: a campaign that spent 40 at a ROAS of 12 is noise, the one that spent 9,000 at 2.1 is the decision. Compute CPA (total cost over total conversions) and ROAS (total conversion value over total cost) from the totals, and keep the raw counts beside every rate — averaging a rate column gives a different and wrong answer, as CPA vs CPL and ROAS by channel work through. Conversions are Google’s count of what it believes it caused, and will not match your store; see why your conversions do not match Shopify.
Search terms and auction insights get their own sections below. Device and location earn a place only when the difference is big enough to act on: mobile CPA 4% above desktop is filler, a state spending 15% of budget at twice the account CPA is a recommendation.
Performance Max channels and products
Performance Max has had a Channel performance page since Google announced it on April 30, 2025, showing clicks, conversions and cost by Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Search partners and Maps. Google added account-level bulk download of those reports and cost in the channel visualization on September 30, 2025. It is also the section most affected by this year’s changes.
What changed and what you did
Two or three sentences: the movement that matters, why, and the action taken. The tables are evidence for this paragraph, not a substitute for it.
How to build it in Google Ads
From a statistics table
Any table in Google Ads can be downloaded as it stands: set the date range, columns, filters and segments, then click the download icon above it. Google lists the formats as Excel CSV, TSV, PDF, XLSX, XML and Google Sheets.
One sentence in that help article matters more than it looks: segments that you’ve applied to the data in the table show up in your report as rows. Add a Device segment and one campaign becomes several rows. Keep that in mind for the 2026 section.
In Report editor
For anything you will run again, use Report editor, found in the Campaigns menu. It opens with a set of predefined reports, ready-made tables you can use as a starting point. Choose rows, columns and filters, then Save; saved reports are visible to everyone with access to the account.
Schedule it
Open a saved report, select the email and schedule icon, choose the account users to send it to, the frequency and the format, and save. From a statistics table it is the download icon → Schedule. Worth knowing:
- Scheduled reports start running at 3 AM in the account’s time zone.
- Campaign filters on a scheduled table carry forward, so a filter on Enabled/Paused picks up new campaigns automatically.
- Saved reports that nobody has opened in over 18 months are removed from the account.
If you want the data in a spreadsheet rather than an inbox, Google’s own Google Ads add-on for Google Sheets creates reports in a sheet and can refresh them on a schedule. Google notes it is only available in the United States and in the English version of Sheets.
A PPC report template you can copy
One page for the reader, the detail behind it for anyone who asks:
PAGE 1 Summary
Cost | Conversions | Conv. value | CPA | ROAS
this month / last month / same month last year
What changed (2-3 sentences) | What we did | What's next
PAGE 2 Campaigns sorted by cost, raw counts beside every rate
PAGE 3 Search terms top by cost | spend with no conversions | negatives added
PAGE 4 Auction insights top 3 competitors, impression share and outranking share
PAGE 5 Device + location only rows that changed a decision
PAGE 6 Performance Max cost and conversions by channel | top products by cost
NOTES conversion actions counted, attribution model, any reporting change this month
The NOTES line is the one most templates leave out, and the one that saves you when a number moves for reasons unrelated to performance.
The search terms report
In the Campaigns menu, go to Insights and reports → Search terms. It shows the searches that triggered your ads and how they performed; the download button exports it. Google omits terms that did not have enough query activity, for privacy, so the sum of the rows will usually be lower than the campaign total. Say so in the report or someone will ask where the rest went.
Performance Max has had search terms reporting since the same April 2025 update that brought channel reporting.
Google Ads auction insights
Auction insights compares you with other advertisers in the same auctions. Select campaigns, ad groups or keywords in the Campaigns menu and choose Auction insights. It is available for Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns that meet a minimum activity threshold, and shows nothing when your impression share is below 10%.
Search campaigns get six statistics. The three worth putting in a report:
- Impression share — impressions you received divided by the impressions you were estimated to be eligible for.
- Overlap rate — how often a competitor’s ad showed when yours did.
- Outranking share — how often you ranked above a competitor, or showed when they did not.
Shopping gets those three only; for Performance Max the report covers Search and Shopping ads, split by the two. A new name with a high overlap rate is worth one line in the “what changed” paragraph.
The 2026 changes that break old templates
Three changes this year alter what a Google Ads export contains. None produces an error; each produces a plausible wrong number.
1. Performance Max rows now split by channel
What changed. On January 28, 2026, Google Ads API v23 “enabled ad network type breakdown for Performance Max campaigns”. Before, the network segment for a Performance Max campaign came back as one value, Cross-network (MIXED in the API); from v23 it can come back as Search, Search partners, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Discover and Maps. Google set v22 to stop working on October 7, 2026, so any script or tool that feeds your template through the API is now on v23 or later.
What it does to an old template.
- A filter on Network = Cross-network returns nothing for recent dates. Performance Max quietly drops out of the report, and the account total shrinks.
- A lookup that expects one row per campaign per month —
VLOOKUPorXLOOKUPon campaign name — finds the first channel row and stops. Performance Max is understated by every other channel. - A sheet that adds a campaign-level total row to the network-segmented rows counts Performance Max twice.
The fix. Total by campaign with SUMIFS, never a lookup, and treat channel as its own breakdown on the Performance Max page. Then check earlier months: if they show one Cross-network row and recent months show several, the trend line mixes two shapes of data.
2. Product reporting jumped on June 15, 2026
What changed. Product cost and conversions used to cover only Performance Max ads on Search networks and Standard Shopping. Per Google’s product reporting help page, product reporting now covers all Performance Max networks and adds Video, App and Demand Gen, and “may cause a one-time increase in metrics such as impressions, clicks, and more for Performance Max campaigns only.” The April 30, 2026 developer announcement dates it June 15, 2026, with no expanded data for earlier dates.
What it does, and the fix. June against May shows product growth that is a reporting change, and year over year is not like for like until mid-2027. Annotate June 2026 on every product chart and compare only months on the same side of June 15.
3. Asset report fields were removed
What changed. Two API changes, per Google’s release notes: in v23 (January 28, 2026) the asset performance label is no longer returned for Search and Display; in v24 (April 22, 2026) the click type segment was removed from the customer, campaign and ad group asset views.
What it does, and the fix. If a script or tool feeds your asset page through the API, the “Best / Good / Low” column for Search assets is now empty and a click-type split no longer works. Drop both and judge assets on their metrics.
SUMIFS, mark June 2026 on product charts, and add one line to NOTES saying which of these changes applies. Ten minutes.The monthly part, in Quiriz
Building the report once is an afternoon. The cost is every month after — download, paste, check the filters, rebuild the charts, reread every sentence for last month’s number — and that is where the 2026 changes bite. Quiriz for paid media starts from the same export. Schedule the Google Ads report into a Google Sheet, or save each month’s download into a Google Drive or OneDrive folder, and connect that sheet or folder once. Quiriz refreshes the dataset on the schedule you set — daily, weekly or monthly. Direct connectors for Google Ads, GA4, Search Console and Meta Ads are coming; HubSpot connects directly today.
An admin writes the definitions once in Company Context: ROAS is conversion value divided by cost, CPA is cost divided by conversions, both from summed totals, and which conversion actions count. Every answer in every app uses them.
In PowerPoint, Build a deck with the campaign performance recipe. Quiriz shows the plan first — each slide’s title, question and chart, table or text — and you edit it before pressing Build. Each chart lands in your template with two to four takeaways written from its own figures, and the deck opens with an executive summary, written last from what the slides found and checked against them. The charts are native, editable PowerPoint charts: right-click → Edit Data opens the numbers behind them, and you restyle them like any chart you built yourself. When the data cannot answer a slide’s question, the slide says so instead of inventing a number.
If the report lives in Word, write questions into the template as markers, such as =QUIRIZ.ASK("cost, conversions and CPA by campaign last month", "table"), and press Resolve markers. Charts arrive as native, editable Word charts, and Figure puts one live number inside your own sentence. In Google Slides and Docs the marker is =QUIRIZ("question", "chart"), with no dot.
Next month, press Refresh all. Every chart, table, figure and note asks its question again and redraws where you left it, formatting kept. In Word, “Mark refreshes as tracked changes” shows every figure that moved as a revision you can accept or reject. If you also run Meta, the companion piece is the Facebook ads report.
Where it does not apply
A one-off look at one account is the Google Ads Overview page, and nothing beats that. And no tool reading exports can turn Google’s conversion claims into what your business actually banked, or deduplicate them against other platforms: Quiriz computes what the export says, and you can set your store total beside it rather than pretend the two agree.
A Google Ads report that refreshes itself
Point Quiriz at your scheduled Google Ads export, ask for the report in plain English, and bring next month's deck or doc current with Refresh all. Free to start.
Try Quiriz free →