Why working with ad-level data from Meta and TikTok is so hard

The problem we see in the market

There’s a very specific problem with ad-level data. Digital marketing teams have a hard time getting it in real time and with full history, whether on Meta or TikTok Ads. It gets especially bad with many accounts: agencies with many clients, or teams that work across several countries and usually run one ad account per country.

Not having that data in one place and in real time creates a lot of friction in decision making: which ad is performing best, which one is bringing conversions and which one isn’t, how the experiments between ads turned out. That friction ends in under-optimized campaigns, because there’s no visibility to decide with confidence.

Why data access is so painful

The platforms, first of all, have no intuitive way to visualize this data, especially with many ads and many accounts. On top of that, the Meta and TikTok APIs take forever to return data: they break, they saturate, and even programmatic access is complex.

Volume is the other enemy

Ad-level data has the highest granularity in digital marketing: campaigns contain ad groups, and ad groups contain ads. That’s a lot of rows, especially when you need the breakdown by day or by hour.

At that volume, the usual analysis tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio saturate: they’re not built for Big Data, they’re built for lighter analysis. Between the painful access and the huge volume, working with this data becomes really hard.