Google Ads is one of the easiest media sources to connect to BigQuery. This guide covers DTS setup, Standard vs. Custom reports, service accounts, MCC structures, PMax tables, and common limitations.
Google Ads is probably the simplest case of all media platforms when it comes to connecting data to BigQuery. The native BigQuery Data Transfer Service connector exists, is well maintained, covers the relevant metrics and tables, and the export setup itself takes only a few dozen minutes. Unless you have a specific reason to choose a different approach, DTS should be your primary option.
This article follows the introductory part of the Media pipelines series: architecture and decision-making, which explains the general principles: when to choose which type of connector, how to set up service accounts, and how to handle backfills. If you have not read the introduction yet, I recommend starting with the section on service accounts, as this article builds on it.
Code and SQL examples for this article are available on GitHub.
What you will need:
When creating the DTS configuration, the first decision you need to make is whether to use Standard reports or Custom reports.
Standard reports download a predefined set of tables covering campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, asset performance, audience metrics, conversion data, and other areas. The schema is defined by Google and cannot be customized. For 90% of use cases, this is sufficient. The default set usually contains more than you will realistically need.
Custom reports allow you to define your own query using Google Ads Query Language (GAQL) and download exactly the schema you need. This approach makes sense mainly in two scenarios: either you need data that is not available in Standard reports, such as specific asset insights or custom segmentation, or you deliberately want to download only the data you are actively using at the moment.
In general, I am not a fan of downloading large amounts of data just in case. With Google Ads, however, the data volume is usually not very high, and there is also a risk that some data may not be available retrospectively later. A typical example is GCLIDs, which are available only for the past 90 days.
Practical recommendation: start with Standard reports. Storage costs in BigQuery are negligible, Custom reports are more fragile because you need to maintain them when the GAQL schema changes, and Standard reports cover everything you need for regular reporting. Move to Custom reports only when you run into a specific use case that Standard reports cannot handle.
Performance Max is, by nature, a black-box campaign type. Google does not show which asset combinations or placements impressions were actually targeted to. Through DTS, however, you can get at least PMax-specific tables, which provide more context than standard campaign reporting.
If you use PMax campaigns in the account, select Include PMax Campaign Tables during setup.
In the GCP console, go to BigQuery → Data Transfers → Create Transfer.
Values to enter:
If you want to backfill data for a previous period, use the day-by-day backfill script from the introductory part of the series. For Google Ads, it makes sense to gradually backfill the last 90 days, mainly because of GCLIDs, which are not available later.
Create a service account dedicated to Google Ads. The process is described in the introductory article of this series.
Google Ads accepts a service account email in the same way as a regular user email, with one exception. If the Google Ads account has the Allowed Domains restriction enabled, typically for clients with stricter security policies, the service account email may not be accepted. In that case, you first need to add the service account domain, meaning <project>.iam.gserviceaccount.com, to the allowlisted domains.
In Google Ads, as an Admin:
The invitation does not need to be accepted. The service account becomes active in Google Ads immediately, unlike regular users. If the access does not appear right away, wait a few minutes.
If you use an MCC structure, meaning a manager account with child accounts, grant the service account access at the MCC level, not on individual child accounts.
Reasons:
If you grant the service account access only to child accounts and later add a new child account, the transfer will ignore it.
Default DTS notifications are sent to the email address of the user who created the transfer. If the transfer runs under a service account, these notifications effectively go nowhere.
Basic alerting is therefore necessary. Without it, you typically find out about a failed transfer only when the client calls to ask why today’s data is missing from reporting. You can set up basic monitoring easily by following the article on service monitoring.
After the first successful run, dozens of tables and views will appear in the target dataset. Standard reports download the standard set of tables. For regular reporting, the most important ones are:
The full query for basic reporting is available on GitHub.
In the third part of the series, we will look at Meta Ads → BigQuery. While Google Ads is a simple case, Meta is one of the most complex ones. We will go through whether the native DTS connector is already usable and what needs to be solved before you start configuring the connector itself.
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