How to Export Data from TikTok Ads to BigQuery

In digital advertising, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are well-known market giants. But despite appearing on the market only a few years ago, TikTok is already equal to these established companies. The TikTok social network is rapidly developing, and, of course, its large audience attracts advertisers. For marketers, exporting data from TikTok makes it possible to compare the effectiveness of TikTok advertising with other channels to find out which campaigns bring more revenue and how to allocate the advertising budget.

This article describes how to upload data from TikTok to data storage, which option is best, and what 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 Early 2024.

TikTok today isn’t just an entertainment platform but a full-fledged advertising channel for promoting businesses. It’s the sixth most popular social network globally, with an audience of about 1.8 billion monthly active users and is expected to reach two billion by the end of 2024. 

TikTok Ads offers a robust and easy-to-use platform, empowering businesses and brands to promote their products and services to a vast global audience. This tool aids in targeting specific audiences, creating ads, accessing detailed insight reports, and efficiently managing advertising campaigns. 

Companies (mostly B2C) use TikTok to attract customers, make their brands recognizable, boost sales, and build audience loyalty.

The platform also continues to show significant growth in ad coverage. TikTok’s ad reach increased by 60 million users (+7.3%) in just 90 days and reached roughly 1.092 billion users worldwide by early 2022, according to data published by ByteDance.

Moreover, this number doesn’t include users under 18, who comprise a significant share of the total base of active TikTok users. Marketers can target ads at TikTok users aged 13 and older.

Exceptional User Engagement: TikTok stands out from its competitors due to its remarkable user engagement levels, surpassing its rapidly expanding user base. 

E-commerce Functionality: While renowned for enhancing awareness and engagement, TikTok is committed to providing marketers with comprehensive tools for the entire sales funnel.

Scalable Creative Resources: TikTok's robust creative tools are seamlessly integrated, offering merchants a scalable approach to crafting compelling ads without requiring additional development resources. 

Brand Awareness: Setting ads apart from competitors becomes effortless by incorporating Brand Effects, an augmented reality feature for video overlays akin to Snapchat lenses. Purposefully designed to highlight unique brand components, this feature is prominent in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), retail, and entertainment sectors. However, its adaptability extends to other industries, such as automotive and travel.

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.

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 in 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. 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. 

By exporting TikTok ads cost data from advertising services to a single data warehouse, you can associate it with user actions on your website, click on links in emails, and purchase orders from the CRM system. 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. BigQuery's columnar storage enhances data search efficiency, while its Colossus File System utilizes the Dremel Query Engine for processing queries. Data movement is expedited through Google's Jupiter Network, ensuring fast and effective data handling.

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-: 

• There’s no need to have servers and connect new ones when the load increases. Cloud storage scales automatically.

• Cloud platforms run faster than traditional storage and automatically redistribute the load.

• To get into cloud storage, you don’t need to install a server on your computer. It’s enough to open the browser and enter the cloud.

But, We choose Google BigQuery and recommend it to our customers for the following reasons:

• Google BigQuery operates as a fully managed Data Warehouse, eliminating the need for in-house setup.

• Google is the leader in the number of data sources for marketers: Ads, Analytics, Search Console, and YouTube. All of these services seamlessly integrate with BigQuery.

• BigQuery processes large data arrays at high speed.

• It’s easy to get started with BigQuery without the help of database administrators. It’s enough to create an account in Google Cloud.

• You only pay for the services you use.

• There are ready-made services and solutions for uploading data to Google BigQuery without the help of developers.

• Its column-based structure offers efficiency advantages such as increased storage efficiency and faster data scans.

 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, writing your scripts, or using specialized services such as 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. You’ll need to spend developer resources to merge data from various accounts and for different dates, check its quality, and quickly respond to possible changes in the ad service APIs. 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.

OWOX BI is an ETL platform that exports data from TikTok Ads, monitors data quality, transforms and cleans data, and uploads it to Google BigQuery. As a result, you have an automated data flow with ready-made datasets from all marketing ad sources transformed into a holistic structure.

Using OWOX BI has the advantage of creating a direct data pipeline between your Google  Bigquery to TikTok. You can upload raw data on all your TikTok campaigns to BigQuery, providing high data granularity for your reports.

What are the advantages of directly integrating TikTok with Google BigQuery? OWOX BI offers a ready-made solution, so you don’t have to do anything by hand. Data is uploaded as it is, i.e., as raw as possible, which allows you to transform it into any convenient look.

If data in TikTok Ads has changed over the past period, OWOX BI updates the data uploaded to BigQuery. In addition, if necessary, you can upload historical data for any period available in the API. This will help you evaluate campaigns over time.

1. Make sure your ad links have UTM tags.

2. Open OWOX BI and in the Pipeline section, click New Pipeline:

3. Choose TikTok as your data source:

4. Choose Google BigQuery as the destination service for data import:

If you don’t have a project in Google BigQuery, learn how to get started with cloud storage and create a dataset in this article.

5. Submit a request to configure data import, and the OWOX team will contact you. If you have any questions, write them in the comments section of the request form.

After OWOX specialists set up the pipeline, data for the previous day will begin to appear daily at 00:00 (UTC) in the table you specified. Depending on the amount of data and the peculiarities of the ad service API, importing data can take up to 24 hours.

If data in the advertising account changes retrospectively, OWOX BI will update all data uploaded to BigQuery within the established update window.

The output will be a list of tables in Google BigQuery with data from the TikTok API:

Example of a table with raw data from TikTok:

Using SQL queries, you can build any table from raw data with the parameters and metrics you need:

TikTok Ads Manager and web analytics systems can analyze the primary TikTok ads metrics for TikTok advertising: CTR, CPC, CPA, CR, sessions, viewing depth, bounce rate, RPC, and ROAS. This is enough for small businesses with few advertising channels to export data for TikTok ads to Bigquery.

If you have many customer touchpoints or have offline stores and you want to see the entire customer purchase path, it’s worth thinking about setting up advanced analytics and creating an automatically updated dashboard with all the metrics you’re interested in. It will allow you to have up-to-date data, conduct a comprehensive assessment of your advertising effectiveness, and make critical decisions quickly.