Client Reporting with Viewer Access and Shared Reports

Why Viewer Access Matters for Agencies

Every agency deals with the same client communication challenge: clients want to see their campaign data, but building custom reports, exporting spreadsheets, and scheduling delivery calls takes time away from actual optimization work. The typical cycle -- client asks for numbers, you export from the ad platform, format in a slide deck, send via email, client responds with follow-up questions, you pull more data -- can consume hours per client per month. Multiply that by 10 or 20 clients and reporting becomes a significant operational cost.

Blueprint's Viewer role is designed to break this cycle. Instead of generating static reports that are outdated the moment you send them, you give clients direct access to a live, read-only dashboard that updates automatically as data syncs. Clients can check performance whenever they want, without waiting for your next scheduled report delivery. The data they see is always current -- updated every 6 hours at minimum -- and presented in the same clean dashboard format your internal team uses.

Critically, the Viewer role is free. It does not count toward your paid seat limit and carries no per-seat cost regardless of how many clients you add. This removes the financial barrier that prevents most agencies from offering real-time client access. With other tools, giving every client a login means paying per seat, which quickly makes the cost prohibitive for agencies managing a large number of smaller accounts. Blueprint's free Viewer seats mean you can give every single client dashboard access without any impact on your monthly bill.

Setting Up Viewer Access

Inviting a client as a Viewer follows the same process as inviting any team member. Navigate to Settings → Team in the workspace dedicated to that client's accounts. Click Invite Member, enter the client's email address, and select Viewer as the role. Blueprint sends an invitation email with a link that expires after 24 hours. If the client already has a Blueprint account (perhaps from another workspace where they are a Viewer), Blueprint automatically detects this via the email lookup and links the invitation to their existing account.

When the client clicks the invitation link, they are prompted to create a Blueprint account if they do not already have one, or sign in if they do. Once they accept the invitation, they are immediately taken to the workspace dashboard with Viewer-level access. There is no onboarding wizard or setup process for Viewers -- they land directly on the performance dashboard and can start exploring the data right away. The entire process, from sending the invitation to the client seeing their dashboard, typically takes under two minutes.

Only Owners and Managers can invite Viewers. Analysts cannot send invitations, which prevents junior team members from accidentally granting client access to the wrong workspace. If a client's invitation expires before they accept it, simply send a new one -- expired invitations are automatically cleaned up and do not count against your team member limit once the 24-hour window has passed.

What Viewers Can See

Viewers get a focused, read-only version of the Blueprint dashboard. They can see the performance reports -- campaign-level metrics like spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, and cost-per-conversion across all connected ad accounts. They can view the campaign overview, which shows the status and basic metrics for each campaign in the workspace. If AI insights are enabled, Viewers can also see anomaly alerts and AI-generated explanations, giving them context on why performance may have shifted.

The key principle is that Viewers see results, not strategy. They can see how campaigns are performing -- how much was spent, how many conversions came in, what the cost per acquisition looks like -- but they cannot see the tactical details of how those results are being achieved. This is an intentional design decision that protects your agency's competitive advantage while still giving clients the transparency they want.

All data Viewers see is real-time, synced on the same schedule as the rest of the workspace. When you update a budget target or make a campaign change, the Viewer sees the resulting performance shift in their dashboard within the next sync cycle. There is no separate "client view" that needs to be published or refreshed -- Viewers are looking at the same underlying data as the rest of the team, just with a restricted set of visible features.

What Viewers Cannot See

The Viewer role strips out everything that falls outside of "campaign performance results." Viewers cannot see keyword data -- no keyword lists, no match types, no bids, no Quality Scores. This protects your keyword strategy, which represents a significant part of your intellectual property as an agency. A client who sees their keyword list might share it with a competitor or a new agency, undermining the research and testing you invested in building that list.

Viewers cannot see budget targets. They can see how much has been spent (because that is a performance metric), but they cannot see what the monthly target is, what pacing strategy is being used, or whether spending is ahead or behind schedule. Budget targets are operational decisions that belong to the team managing the account. Similarly, Viewers have no access to team management -- they cannot see who else is in the workspace, what roles people have, or any team-related settings.

Most importantly, Viewers cannot perform any write actions. There are no buttons to change settings, no forms to submit, no actions to trigger. The Viewer experience is purely observational. Even if a Viewer somehow constructs an API request to a write endpoint, the server-side RBAC enforcement rejects it with a 403 response. The UI hides write controls entirely, and the API enforces the restriction independently -- defense in depth ensures that Viewers can only read, never write.

Scaling Viewer Access for Multiple Clients

Blueprint's workspace-scoped access model makes scaling Viewer access across multiple clients straightforward. Each client should have their own dedicated workspace containing only the ad accounts relevant to that client. When you invite a client as a Viewer to their workspace, they can only see data within that workspace -- they have no visibility into your other workspaces or other clients' data. This isolation is enforced at the database query level, not just the UI level, so there is no risk of data leakage between workspaces.

For agencies managing 10, 20, or 50 clients, this pattern scales cleanly. Create a workspace per client, invite each client's stakeholders as Viewers in their respective workspace, and your internal team members can be assigned roles across all workspaces. Your PPC analysts might be Analysts in every workspace, your account directors might be Managers, and the agency principal is typically the Owner across all workspaces. The Viewer seats are free for every workspace, so adding client access to 50 workspaces costs exactly the same as adding it to one.

Some agencies have clients with multiple stakeholders who want access -- a marketing director, a CMO, and a finance director might all want to see the dashboard. You can invite all of them as Viewers in the same workspace. Each counts against the workspace's team member limit (5 active + pending members), so plan accordingly. If you need more than 5 team members including Viewers in a single workspace, contact Blueprint support to discuss your options.

Best Practices for Client Communication

Giving clients dashboard access is only half the equation -- you also need to set expectations about what they are looking at and how to interpret it. When you first invite a client as a Viewer, send a brief orientation message explaining what they will see (campaign performance metrics, spend data, AI-generated insights) and what they will not see (keywords, budget targets, team settings). This prevents confusion and preempts questions like "why can't I see the keyword list?" before they arise.

Consider scheduling a short walkthrough call when a client first gets Viewer access. Show them how to navigate the dashboard, explain what the key metrics mean, and demonstrate how to use date range filters. Clients who understand how to use the dashboard will rely on it for self-service data checks rather than emailing you for numbers. This initial investment of 15-20 minutes can save hours of back-and-forth over the following months.

Use the Viewer dashboard as a conversation tool during regular client meetings. Instead of presenting static slides, pull up the live dashboard during your call and walk through the data together. This reinforces that the data is real-time and transparent, builds trust by showing the same view the client can access anytime, and allows you to answer questions by drilling into the data on the spot. Over time, clients who have regular access to their dashboard tend to ask fewer ad-hoc questions and have more productive, forward-looking conversations during scheduled reviews because they already know where performance stands.