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Don’t overlook TikTok in your ad strategy. While Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have long dominated digital advertising, TikTok has quickly caught up, despite being much newer. Its massive and growing user base makes it a valuable platform for advertisers. Exporting data from TikTok lets marketers compare its performance against other channels and make smarter decisions about where to spend their budget.
This article describes how to upload data from TikTok to data storage, including the best option, a comparison of the manual method and automated solutions for exporting data, and the method our specialists recommend.
Note: This article on exporting data from TikTok ads to BigQuery was published in 2022 and is updated with new context to suit the current state of updates in July 2025.
TikTok has quickly grown from a viral video app into a powerful marketing platform where businesses of all sizes can reach and engage their audience. You’ll need a TikTok Ads account to access ad tools and view performance data. With features like audience targeting, easy ad creation, and performance insights, it offers brands a flexible and creative space to run campaigns, boost sales, and build long-term customer loyalty.
Between January 2024 and January 2025, the platform saw a notable rise in advertising potential - marketers gained access to 31.2 million more users, marking a 2% increase in total ad reach within a year. This steady growth reinforces TikTok’s value as a key channel in the modern digital marketing mix.
TikTok isn’t just a platform for trends and dances – it’s become a powerful space for brands to grow, connect, and sell creatively. If your business isn’t exploring TikTok yet, here are seven compelling reasons to get started.
Sending your TikTok data to BigQuery helps you store, manage, and analyze everything in one place. In this section, we’re covering why this integration matters for marketing teams and how it improves campaign tracking and reporting.
BigQuery serves as a powerful business intelligence platform, allowing marketers to leverage advanced analytics tools for comprehensive reporting, data modeling, and actionable insights. This enables data-driven teams to make informed decisions and optimize campaigns with confidence.
TikTok Ads Metrics helps businesses to track ad performance, revealing views, watch duration, and user actions. Example: Campaign report includes key metrics like Impressions, Reach, Clicks, and Total ad spend for analysis. It’s essential to track TikTok ads metrics as it helps in improving ad performance and cutting down promotional costs.
You view TikTok ads metrics and statistics on TikTok advertising both in the TikTok application and your TikTok Ads Manager account. Running and analyzing ads in Ads Manager is best if your goal is to boost sales rather than user activity. The advertising account has more technical capabilities and metrics for setting up campaigns and working with data. For deeper analysis, you can export data directly from TikTok Ads Manager using available tools or APIs to access more detailed campaign metrics.
TikTok Ads Manager, by default, provides data about coverage, views, clicks, ad spending, and more. If you install a TikTok pixel on your website and configure event tracking, you can find out how users who have visited the website behave after clicking on the ad in the application.
Information stored in Ads Manager only tells you about the effectiveness of the TikTok source. But what if the user came to you from organic traffic, returned to your website, clicked on a link on TikTok, and purchased it after receiving an email?
How can you assess the effectiveness of the TikTok channel in this case? You won’t know how it interacts with other marketing sources and how they mutually impact your business until you merge the marketing data.
In many companies, marketing isn’t limited to TikTok alone; sales can be online and offline. Therefore, it’s necessary to merge data from TikTok Ads Manager with data from the website, other advertising services, and CRM systems. Typically, you start with raw data from TikTok Ads before combining it with other marketing data sources. For marketers to have the whole picture, see how much money is spent on advertising, and determine which advertising channels are most efficient, they need to apply an ETL tool like OWOX BI.
While TikTok Ads Manager provides plenty of useful information, it becomes even more powerful when combined with Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools that allow you to select appropriate destinations for different types of marketing data during the integration process.
By exporting TikTok ads cost data from advertising services to a single data warehouse, you can associate it with user actions on your website, clicks on links in emails, and purchase orders from the CRM system.
BigQuery serves as the primary destination for TikTok Ads data, ensuring that all relevant information is centralized for analysis and reporting. This helps you set up advanced analytics and assess the impact of all marketing efforts on business metrics, both online and offline.
Data from marketing services uploaded to the repository can be used to perform calculations according to the attribution model, and the results can be used for automatic bid management. You can also create user audiences based on merged data and the results of attribution calculations, then automatically send those audiences to advertising services. Finally, you can build any reports you need without restrictions based on data collected in the data warehouse.
Google BigQuery, a cloud-based Data Warehouse on the Google Cloud Platform, facilitates business analytics. This serverless SaaS solution offers exceptional data management, access control, and Machine Learning functionalities. It’s adept at handling vast data volumes, providing large-scale storage and SQL query capabilities.
Users can easily load data from various sources for analysis. BigQuery’s application programming interface enables seamless integration with external platforms and data sources. BigQuery uses columnar storage and the Dremel engine for fast queries, while Google’s Jupiter Network ensures quick and reliable data transfers.
Google's BigQuery is a top-tier cloud platform that simplifies the analysis of TikTok Ads. Like its competitors, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Azure, BigQuery has several key advantages over traditional data storage like-:
But, we choose Google BigQuery and recommend it to our customers for the following reasons:
Google BigQuery doesn’t have a built-in tool for uploading ads data from TikTok Ads Manager. You can solve this problem by uploading data manually, for example, you can upload TikTok Ads data to BigQuery using local files, custom scripts, or automated tools like OWOX BI. Let’s take a look at each of these methods to connect data from TikTok ads to BigQuery.
You can download cost data from a TikTok ad account to separate files and manually upload them via the BigQuery interface. The disadvantages of this method are obvious: a lot of extra work and no automation.
You can also write your scripts to upload the data you need from TikTok. The downside is that the work of these scripts must be constantly monitored and supported. Building custom ETL pipelines can take a lot of time and developer effort. You’ll need to manage merging data from different accounts and dates, ensure quality, and stay on top of changes in TikTok’s API.
In addition, the data upload of TikTok ads to BigQuery must be retrospectively updated if it has changed in TikTok Ads, expenses must be converted from all advertising sources into a single currency, etc. If this isn’t done, poor-quality data can lead to erroneous decisions that will cost the business dearly.
Utilizing Google Sheets as a medium offers a more interactive way to handle TikTok Ads data before importing it into Google BigQuery. This method involves exporting data from TikTok Ads to Google Sheets, where you can manually adjust and refine the data. Once formatted to your preference, the data can be uploaded to BigQuery using Google Sheets' built-in integration features. While this approach allows for greater data manipulation and is user-friendly, it does require manual effort. It might not be ideal for very large datasets, as it lacks the automation capabilities of more direct integration methods.
If you don’t want to deal with manual uploads or write scripts, OWOX Data Marts gives you a free and simple way to send your TikTok Ads data directly into Google BigQuery. Just download the ready-made template from GitHub and follow the instructions with no coding required. It automatically pulls in your raw ad data, checks it for errors, cleans it up, and keeps it up to date, even if your campaigns change later.
You get a clean dataset in BigQuery that’s ready for reporting. Plus, you can combine it with data from other ad platforms to build full-funnel marketing reports and track performance across all your channels in one place.
To see how this works in detail, check out our full guide on the free TikTok to BigQuery connector. It explains how to set it up and start using your TikTok data for better, faster reporting in BigQuery.
Working with multiple data sources is a big part of getting clear, accurate insights and TikTok Ads is no exception. Here are some best practices to help you manage TikTok Ads data in BigQuery more effectively and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
OWOX Data Marts (Community Apps Script Edition) is an open-source JS connector library that lets you import marketing, financial, or CRM data into Google Sheets or BigQuery for free, with no vendor lock-in and full control over your data.
Each connector in the Data Marts library pulls data directly from platforms like Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more, is open-source, customizable, has no third-party vendor lock-in, and is free to use forever. That means data analysts can set up reliable pipelines without engineering help, and business users gain direct access to clean, structured data – all within your existing workflows.
Get started with the free connectors.
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