Last Updated: October 25, 2023

The BigQuery data transfer service automates data transfer from popular data sources to BigQuery without the need to write any code.

Just to give you an example of how data transfers work in the Google Cloud console, let’s create a new data transfer that automatically sends Google Ads data to your BigQuery project on a regular basis.

Follow the steps below:

Step-1: Create a new BigQuery project where you are going to store Google ads data in BigQuery. If you already have a BigQuery project, use that one to create a new dataset for storing Google ads data.

Step-2: Create a new dataset in your existing project for storing Google Ads data. You can also use an existing dataset, but I prefer creating a new dataset to make data management easier.

Step-3: Navigate to https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery 

Step-4: Make sure that you are in the correct project:

Step-5: Click on the three dots menu next to your project ID:

Step-6: Click on ‘Create dataset’:

Step-7: Name your data set (e.g. ‘google_ads’) and then click on the ‘Create Dataset’ button:

You should now see the new dataset created under your project ID:

But this dataset does not contain any data table or any data. For that, you would first need to create a data transfer. 

Step-8: Click on ‘Data Transfers’ from the left navigation menu:

Step-9: Click on the ‘CREATE A TRANSFER’ button:

Step-10: Enable the BigQuery data transfer API. 

Note: You get the option to enable the BigQuery data transfer API only when you are creating your very first data transfer via the Google Cloud console.

Step-11: Click on the ‘Source’ drop-down menu:

Step-12: Click on ‘Google Ads’:

Step-13: Type ‘Google Ads to BigQuery’ under the field ‘Transfer config name’:

Step-14: Set your schedule options:

Step-15: Select the dataset you created earlier (from the drop-down menu) for storing Google Ads data. In our case, it is ‘google_ads’:

Step-16: Enter the customer ID (without any dashes) of the Google Ads account whose data you want to transfer to your BigQuery project.

Step-17: Click on the ‘Save’ button:

You should now see a screen like the one below, which shows the current status of your data transfer:

Step-18: Click on the browser refresh button to check the current status:

Now you can see under the ‘Summary’ section that the transfer status changed from ‘The transfer run is pending’ to ‘The transfer run is in progress’.

You may need to wait for a couple of minutes, depending on the volume of data you are transferring to your BigQuery project.

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Step-19: Keep clicking on the browser refresh button after every 5 minutes until you see the transfer status of ‘The transfer run has completed successfully’.

Step-20: Click on the ‘SQL Workspace’ from the left navigation menu:

Step-21: Navigate to the ‘google_ads’ dataset you created earlier. Scroll down until you see the list of new data tables in the dataset:

Step-22: Click on one of the data tables and then on the ‘Preview’ tab to see the imported Google ads data: