TikTok Ads Research Service

Find the ads, messages, advertisers, markets, hashtags, calls to action, and landing pages that matter to your research — without turning a public ad library into a spreadsheet-cleaning project.

Use Product / Topic to study how a market is being advertised, or use Specific Competitor to research ads belonging to a safely resolved advertiser or brand group. Start with a real Preview of up to 12 canonical ads with no result fees, then move to Full research when the result set is useful.

TikTok Ads Research Service is an independent research tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by TikTok.

What can you use it for?

• Explore a product or market topic. Find materially relevant ads for a product, category, topic, or keyword across supported European markets.
• Research a competitor. Resolve the advertiser safely before collecting ads, so a similar company name is not silently treated as the competitor you meant.
• Compare market activity. Search one country, a selected group, or all 32 supported countries while keeping the market provenance of each ad.
• Study messaging and creative strategy. Review ad copy, dates, audience signals, hashtags, calls to action, campaign goals, and destinations.
• Prepare data for analysis or automation. Export a clean Dataset or consume the same contract through the Apify API.

The fastest way to start

1. Choose Product / Topic or Specific Competitor.
2. Enter the product, topic, keyword, brand, or advertiser name.
3. Select Preview — up to 12 rows, no result fees.
4. Choose one market for a quick first run, or keep all supported countries for broad coverage.
5. Run the Actor and open Research report for the readable overview or Canonical ad results for the Dataset.

Preview returns real results in the same core schema as Full research. It is a capped sample, so its completeness is always marked preview_only. Apify platform usage may still apply according to your Apify plan; Preview itself does not create successful result or enrichment fees.

Choose the right research type

Product / Topic

Use this for queries such as running shoes, electric vehicles, or summer sale. With Keep only materially relevant ads enabled, the query must be a substantial subject of the ad. If removing the query mention would leave the ad's purpose almost unchanged, the ad is excluded as incidental.

Product / Topic research discovers relevant advertising. It does not claim that a keyword match proves exact advertiser identity or that every historical ad is present in the public archive.

Specific Competitor

Use this when you want ads that belong to a company or brand. A competitor can be a verified brand cluster containing several related legal advertiser identities — for example, regional entities belonging to the same brand. Each ad still retains the specific advertiser identity that supplied it.

If the name matches unrelated advertisers and they cannot be safely joined, the run does not guess. It returns a clear refinement step so you can choose the intended competitor.

Preview and Full research

Mode	Best for	Depth
Preview	Checking relevance and output quality before a larger run	Up to 12 canonical rows across the whole request; no result fees
Full	A requested research scope for export, analysis, or enrichment	Optional limit per country, or all source-available results in the date range

Leaving Maximum results per country empty in Full mode requests all results that the public source makes available. This can take longer and use more platform resources, especially across many markets. For a first Full run, select one or two countries and enter a modest limit.

Dates and market coverage

Search all available history, or enter a From and To date. Both fields accept DDMMYYYY, DD.MM.YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY, and YYYY-MM-DD. For the current end date, use recent, now, or today. Invalid, impossible, future, and reversed ranges are rejected before research begins, with a plain-language correction.

The launch scope covers 32 supported European markets. A fixed To date includes the entire UTC day. First seen, Latest seen, and Observed window describe public source observations; they do not prove uninterrupted activity between those dates.

Optional value layers

Ad Detail

Detail enriches the same canonical row with successfully available destination, CTA, campaign goal, targeting, and media information. You do not have to join a second ad table. If Detail cannot be verified for an ad, the valid base row remains available and its detailStatus explains what happened.

Advertiser Report

Available for Specific Competitor research. The report is country-scoped and returned in a stable envelope. A successful country remains useful when another country has no report data or is temporarily unavailable.

What you receive

Readable result

Open Research report for an HTML overview of the run, its outcome, the useful results, and any action you need to take next.

Canonical Dataset

Each accepted creative appears once, even when the source exposes it under several ad IDs or in multiple countries. Source IDs, country observations, instance evidence, and provenance are retained rather than overwritten. Exact duplicates are collapsed before result limits and billing are applied. The Overview view contains 12 research columns:

1. Advertiser
2. Ad message
3. Market
4. First seen
5. Latest seen
6. Estimated audience
7. Observed window
8. Hashtags used
9. Call to action
10. Campaign goal
11. Traffic destination
12. Audience targeting

Supporting outputs

• Advertisers — advertiser identities connected to returned ads.
• Hashtag summary — Unicode-safe hashtag counts derived from returned ad text.
• Rejected candidates — machine-readable exclusions for audit and support.
• Run summary — outcome, completeness, counts, warnings, and next action.
• Run manifest — normalized input and technical provenance for automation or troubleshooting.
• Advertiser report — optional country-scoped report for a verified competitor.

Native Dataset export supports JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, RSS, and other Apify formats.

Result states you can act on

• SUCCESS_WITH_RESULTS — usable ads were delivered.
• VALID_EMPTY — the requested scope completed successfully but contained no usable rows.
• PARTIAL_RESULT — useful output exists, but part of the requested scope did not complete. The summary says what remains and what to retry.
• BLOCKED_FAILURE — the run could not produce a trustworthy result. It is never presented as an empty success.
• INVALID_INPUT — one or more fields need correction before research can begin.
• TARGET_REFINEMENT_REQUIRED — unrelated advertiser candidates were found; select the verified competitor you intended.

The Actor does not fail silently: every blocked, invalid, or partial run provides a reason and a recommended next step in SUMMARY.json and the human-readable report.

Common questions

Does this provide every TikTok ad ever published?

No. It researches the ads the public source makes available for the selected scope. The Actor makes completeness explicit and never labels a source failure as “no ads”.

Is Product / Topic the same as exact competitor research?

No. Product / Topic finds materially relevant advertising about a subject. Specific Competitor first establishes a trusted advertiser or brand-cluster identity.

What happens when one selected country has no data?

Useful results from other countries remain available. The summary identifies the empty or unavailable country and, for a temporary source problem, recommends trying that country separately later.

Are duplicate ads exported twice?

The default Dataset contains one canonical row per accepted creative. When the source exposes that creative under several ad IDs or in several markets, the instances are merged into that row. sourceAdIds, adInstanceCount, and adInstances preserve the underlying evidence without charging or exporting duplicate customer rows.

Does a missing ad mean that it was deleted or stopped?

No. One absence can be caused by the selected window, market scope, filters, or public source visibility. The debut research release does not present one missing observation as proof that an ad was removed.

Is scheduled Watch / Delta monitoring included?

Not in this debut Store surface. Its independent baseline, comparison, notification, and billing lifecycle is being completed separately so ordinary research runs cannot silently create or change monitoring state.

Support

Open SUMMARY.json first. It explains what completed, what did not, and what to do next. If something does not work as expected, write to us through the Actor's Apify support channel. We read every report and will respond as quickly as we can with a practical answer, a fix, or a clear update.

If a missing feature would make the product more useful to you, tell us about it. We cannot promise every request, but we may add it when it fits the product and can be delivered reliably.

Please include the run link whenever possible. Never post passwords, API tokens, identity documents, or other credentials in a support message.

Release notes

See ./CHANGELOG.md for customer-visible changes. The public release will use bounded daily health checks to verify a non-empty Preview without turning a maintenance test into an expensive Full run.