TikTok Ads Manager report export
A custom/dashboard performance export from TikTok Ads Manager (CSV/XLSX). Read as a straightforward spend-and-sales table, it hides an account- timezone convention, several incompatible definitions of a "view," and creative-name text that breaks naive CSV parsing.
The shape, how the file is really laid out
A custom report exports columns you selected with the header near the top;
the Ads Manager UI shows a summary/total row for the report. Money ("Cost")
is in the ad account's currency, and, critically, all time bucketing uses
the AD ACCOUNT time zone fixed at account creation (often a UTC offset that
is not the business's local zone). Conversions ("Complete payment,"
"Total complete payment value," "Conversion") are reported under a
configurable attribution window (commonly 7-day click / 1-day view). Video
engagement is split across many columns: "Video views," "2-second video
views," "6-second video views," and views at 25/50/75/100%. Files are UTF-8
(sometimes with a BOM) and creative/ad names routinely contain emoji,
non-Latin characters and commas.
The traps
"Views" is ambiguous, a plain "Video views" is counted on a far looser threshold than a "6-second view," so quoting "views" without the column definition compares unlike things.
- Every trap in this export, worked through
- The reconciliation anchor, the total the file asserts about itself
- The refusal cases, when to stop and ask instead of guess
Reference: TikTok Ads Manager Help Center, create & export custom reports, time zone & attribution settings · TikTok Business API, Reporting (attribution windows, video-view metric definitions)