TikTok Ad Library Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

TikTok publishes a free, keyless Commercial Content Library to satisfy the EU's Digital Services Act ad-transparency mandate. This Actor searches it by advertiser name or keyword and returns one structured row per matching ad — advertiser, caption, first/last shown dates, estimated audience band, and creative URLs. It completes the ad-transparency class alongside our google-ads-transparency, linkedin-ad-library-scraper, and meta-ad-library-scraper Actors.

🔥 Features

• 🛡️ We open a real browser session to earn your search a seat, then reuse that trust (Firefox-fingerprint requests) for the rest of the run — never raw Python knocking on the door.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff on 429 / 503 and network errors, honouring Retry-After — up to 5 attempts per call.
• 🧭 We follow TikTok's cursor pagination exactly — the opaque search_id token from each response is echoed verbatim into the next request, never a guessed offset.
• 🌐 Apify Proxy on every request, ready to escalate to residential if TikTok ever tightens up (it hasn't yet).
• 🧱 We isolate per-row failures — one malformed ad object is skipped and logged, the run keeps going.
• 💰 You pay only for ads that land. A search that matches nothing still succeeds — you're never charged for a failed run.

💡 Use cases

• Competitive intel — track a competitor's TikTok ad creative, captions, and rotation cadence over time.
• Paid-media benchmarking — compare estimated audience bands and creative formats across advertisers in your category.
• Brand protection — check whether your brand name or trademark shows up in someone else's TikTok ads.
• Creative research — pull real, live ad captions and hooks for inspiration before building your own campaign.
• Compliance / ad-transparency reporting — export a clean, structured record of an advertiser's EU-region TikTok activity.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Enter one or more Queries — advertiser name(s) or keyword(s), e.g. ["nike", "zara"].
3. Optionally set Region (defaults to "all" — every EU/EEA + UK + Switzerland + Turkey region TikTok supports).
4. Optionally set Date from / Date to (defaults to a trailing 30-day window).
5. Set Max results per query.
6. Click Start. Rows stream into the run's dataset as TikTok's cursor pages are followed, one independent loop per query.
7. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
queries	array<string>	yes	—	Advertiser name(s) / keyword(s). One search per entry (1-200 chars each).
region	string	no	"all"	"all" or a live TikTok support-region code (EU/EEA + UK + Switzerland + Turkey only — no US).
dateFrom	string	no	30 days before dateTo	ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
dateTo	string	no	today	ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	no	500	Cap per query across cursor pages (1-20,000).
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"], "apifyProxyCountry": "US"}	Apify Proxy configuration.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["nike", "zara"],
  "region": "all",
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 25,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"], "apifyProxyCountry": "US" }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one matched ad.

Field	Type	Notes
ad_id	string	TikTok's internal ad ID.
query_term	string	The query that produced this row.
region	string	The region scope that produced this row.
advertiser_name	string	Advertiser display name — the only advertiser identifier TikTok exposes (no numeric advertiser ID).
ad_caption	string | null	Ad caption text.
first_shown_date / last_shown_date	string | null	ISO-8601 UTC.
estimated_audience	string | null	Estimated audience band, e.g. "100K-200K".
spend	string | null	Reported spend band; empty/null for most ordinary (non-DSA-flagged) ads — never fabricated.
impressions	integer | null	Reported impression count; 0 for most ordinary ads, null only if genuinely missing.
video_url / cover_img	string | null	Primary creative video/cover-image URL.
image_urls	array<string>	Additional creative image URLs, if any.
ad_url	string	Direct TikTok Ad Library URL for this ad.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp this row was scraped.

Example output

{
  "ad_id": "1873877803725954",
  "query_term": "nike",
  "region": "all",
  "advertiser_name": "NIKE Retail B.V.",
  "ad_caption": "Une rentrée signée Nike",
  "first_shown_date": "2026-08-16T00:00:00+00:00",
  "last_shown_date": "2026-09-05T00:00:00+00:00",
  "estimated_audience": "100K-200K",
  "spend": null,
  "impressions": 0,
  "video_url": "https://library.tiktok.com/api/v1/cdn/.../video/...",
  "cover_img": "https://p16-common-sign.tiktokcdn.com/...",
  "image_urls": [],
  "ad_url": "https://library.tiktok.com/ads/detail/?ad_id=1873877803725954",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-12T12:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge — fires on the first delivered row, not at boot
ad-result	$0.003	Per ad row written to the dataset

Example: 1,000 matched ads ≈ $3.20 total ($0.20 start + 1000 x $0.003). No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account free credit.

A run that delivers nothing costs you nothing. 🧾 The start fee is charged on the first row that actually reaches your dataset, so if TikTok blocks the run or your search matches no ads, your bill for it is $0.00.

Keep the RESIDENTIAL proxy default (with its US country pin) — both are load-bearing. 🛡️ This Actor mints its API token by loading the Ad Library the way a browser does, once per run. From a datacenter exit that page simply never issues the request the token rides on, so the run stops with a clear error instead of quietly returning nothing — we verified both sides in the cloud on 2026-09-12. The proxy exit is also pinned to the US to match the browser session's locale — a mismatched exit country is a fingerprint red flag that can stall the token mint. You don't need to think about any of this; just don't override the proxy defaults to save a little cost, because the run will fail rather than degrade.

🚧 Limitations

TikTok's Commercial Content Library covers **EU/EEA + UK + Switzerland

• Turkey only** — there is no US region, and this is a hard product limit, not something this Actor can work around. region is validated live against TikTok's own support-regions list at the start of every run. The total count TikTok's search response returns is a display cap (commonly 5000), not an exact match count — treat it as "5,000+", not precise. spend/impressions are genuinely empty/0 for ordinary commercial ads (TikTok only populates these for DSA-flagged categories like political/social-issue ads) — this Actor ships them as-is rather than inventing numbers. There is no numeric advertiser ID in either the list or detail response — only the advertiser's display name.

❓ FAQ

Does this need a TikTok account or API key?

No. TikTok's Commercial Content Library search API is free and keyless.

Why is there no US region?

TikTok built this product to satisfy the EU's DSA transparency mandate — it genuinely only covers EU/EEA + UK + Switzerland + Turkey. This Actor validates your region input against TikTok's own live support-regions list and fails loud (before any search call) if you pick one outside it.

What happens if my query matches nothing?

That query finishes successfully with zero rows and a status message naming it — you're not charged per-result for a failed search, and other queries in the same run are unaffected.

Can I search multiple advertisers in one run?

Yes — pass multiple queries. Each runs its own independent cursor-pagination loop, so one query hitting a snag never stops the others from finishing.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a field we don't ship yet? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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