TikTok campaign metrics under-report vs TikTok Ads Manager (spend −22.3%, impressions −26.6%) — gap is non-uniform and worse on older dates

Summary

For a TikTok ad account, the metrics returned by the Ads API are consistently LOWER than what TikTok Ads Manager shows for the same campaign and the same date range.

We have ruled out the obvious causes on our side (see "What we ruled out"), and we have evidence that the pipeline itself is correct: several ads match Ads Manager to the exact KRW. The shortfall appears to be missing/stale delivery data for a subset of ads and days.

Reproduction

GET /v1/ads/campaigns/1869603293308258/analytics ?accountId=6aba06dcb53728af48fa0de6 &fromDate=2026-09-01&toDate=2026-09-30

Connection (SocialAccount): 6aba06dcb53728af48fa0de6 (platform: tiktokads) Ad account: 7450327792480518161 Campaign: 1869603293308258 "*구매_칠레" Currency: KRW Compared against: TikTok Ads Manager, same campaign, Sep 1–30 2026

The gap

What we ruled out

1. Missing days — the response contains all 30 daily rows and none has spend = 0.

2. Date boundary / timezone — widening the window to 2026-08-31..2026-10-01 still returns only 2,228,743 (still ~12% short).

3. Missing ads — /v1/ads with pagination returns 170 ads for this campaign, with 170 unique platformAdId values and no duplicates. Querying with and without a date range returns the same 170. Their spend sums exactly to the campaign total (1,976,136), so the API is internally consistent.

4. Missing ad groups — the API returns 1 ad group for this campaign, which matches Ads Manager (1 ad group).

Evidence that our side is correct

Ads Manager groups creatives under a parent row; the API returns one object per creative. Grouping our rows by the parent name they carry, several groups match the Ads Manager parent row exactly, to the KRW:

So the shortfall is not uniform scaling and not a currency/aggregation error — some ads are complete and others are not.

The gap is non-uniform and worse for older dates

Daily spend, API / Ads Manager:

09-01 104,931 / 106,168 99% 09-04 61,658 / 86,677 71% 09-08 42,169 / 83,479 51% 09-11 34,870 / 81,106 43% 09-15 37,358 / 67,252 56% 09-19 35,673 / 85,958 42% <- worst 09-20 40,405 / 70,746 57%

Sep 1-20 total: 1,006,892 / 1,481,965 = 68% Sep 21-30 total: 969,244 / 1,061,811 = 91%

Likely cause (our hypothesis)

Ad status also looks stale. The API returns 169 of 170 ads as active (1 cancelled), while Ads Manager shows several of the parent rows as Paused for the same period.

The AdEngagementCounts schema documents a related behaviour: "paused TikTok ads are not re-synced, so campaigns that ended before the rollout keep 0s here"

If paused ads are not re-synced, their historical delivery would only be partially stored — which matches both the non-uniform daily shortfall and the fact that older dates are affected more.

Request

1. Please confirm the cause.

2. Please re-sync historical delivery for this ad account (and, if the cause is general, for TikTok accounts overall).

3. If paused ads are intentionally not re-synced, we would like to know the exact boundary so we can describe the limitation to advertisers.

Impact on us

We have disabled TikTok result-report publishing on our side until this is resolved. Our reports are frozen snapshots, so an under-reported number would be preserved permanently and would not match what the advertiser sees in Ads Manager. Our live dashboard still shows TikTok data with a notice that the numbers may read lower than the platform.