Google Ads BigQuery connector: Google's free transfer or a paid connector

Google Ads BigQuery connector: Google's transfer first

Google's BigQuery Data Transfer Service is the Google Ads BigQuery connector to try first. Google's pricing page lists the Google Ads and GA4 transfers under connectors with no charge, and a Google Ads transfer can run once every 24 hours at most.

BigQuery itself is billed separately above its free tier of 10 GiB of storage and 1 TiB of queries a month. Past that, on-demand queries cost $6.25 per TiB in us-central1, as read on October 24, 2026. The BigQuery sandbox needs no credit card, but it does not support the Data Transfer Service.

Setup asks for a Google Ads customer ID or a manager account with read access, a Standard or Custom report type and a refresh window of 7 days by default, up to 30. Google says individual credentials need 2-Step Verification and the transfer does not support incremental loads. A backfill can reach as far back as the Google Ads data retention policy allows, and the service supports up to 8000 customer IDs for each manager account.

When a paid connector earns its place

A paid connector earns its place when you need hourly loads, backfills, or Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads in the same BigQuery project. Google lists its own Facebook Ads transfer among paid connectors billed in slot-hours, with a 24-hour minimum interval.

Windsor.ai loads BigQuery through a destination task that creates the table and partitions it by date by default: daily on Basic, hourly from Standard. As read on October 24, 2026, Standard is $99 a month billed annually, or $118 on monthly billing, for 7 sources and 75 accounts. Basic is $19 billed annually. Backfills need a paid plan, and BigQuery needs a Google Cloud project with billing enabled.

Paid BigQuery connectors compared

The table puts Google's transfer beside six paid connectors, with prices billed annually, per month. Dataslayer treats BigQuery as an enterprise destination with monthly row limits; its core destinations carry none.

Funnel counts a warehouse destination such as BigQuery as 300 flexpoints, its purchased capacity units.

Picking by schedule and platforms

Pick Google's transfer for Google Ads alone, or GA4, on a daily schedule: both are listed as no-charge connectors. Pick a paid connector for several ad platforms or loads more often than daily. That means Windsor.ai from Standard for hourly, Dataslayer Advanced within its 100,000-row monthly BigQuery cap, or Funnel Business with exports every 2 hours.

A Windsor.ai free account can load BigQuery once a day for 30 days, on a Google Cloud project with billing enabled; a Forever Free plan follows, with the Terms saying trial access ends. The Facebook Ads routes are in how to connect Facebook Ads to BigQuery, plans are in Windsor.ai pricing, and the closest BigQuery rival is in Windsor.ai vs Dataslayer.