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Overview

Hightouch lets you send data from your warehouse into Google BigQuery to join it with Google’s Ads Data Hub. Connecting Hightouch to BigQuery requires some setup in both platforms. It’s recommended to set up a service account with the correct permissions in BigQuery before configuring the connection in Hightouch.

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Supported syncing

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BigQuery credential setup

1

Create a project and enable BigQuery API

  1. Login to the Google Developers Console.
  2. Configure the Cloud Platform:
  3. Copy your Project ID for later use.
  4. Find the location of your BigQuery dataset or sets. You can find this by querying the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA view or by visiting the Google Cloud web console and clicking on a BigQuery dataset in the Explorer panel. You need both Project ID and Data location when connecting Hightouch to BigQuery. Dataset Location in the Google Cloud Console
Make sure billing is enabled on your project, otherwise Hightouch can’t write into the cluster.
2

Create a service account

To create a service account, follow the setup instructions in our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) documentation.
3

Grant access

Your GCP service account will need permission to read and write data to BigQuery. You can set up your service account to have full access to your project using a predefined role. Otherwise, you can create a custom role and provide limited access according to a user-specified list of permissions.

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Grant full access

You can grant full access by assigning the bigquery.user, bigquery.dataViewer, and bigquery.dataEditor roles to your service account. You can do this in the Google Cloud web console or by running these snippets in the Cloud Shell.Grant permission to read metadata and list tables:
Grant permission to read data from tables and views:
Grant permission to write data to tables and views:

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Grant limited access

If you don’t want to grant full access to your BigQuery service account, you can opt to grant limited access instead. You can do this by assigning the bigquery.dataViewer and bigquery.dataEditor roles only to the specific datasets, tables, or views you want to use in Hightouch.Since you are assigning these roles only to specific resources, you need to assign the bigquery.user role and grant the bigquery.tables.get permission at the project level. For this, you can create a custom role in the Google Cloud web console based on an existing predefined role (bigquery.user), which you can name custom.bigquery.user. When setting up the custom role, click Add permissions to add the bigquery.tables.get permission to this custom role.Then assign this role to your service account at the project level. You can do this in the Google Cloud web console or by running this snippet in the Cloud Shell:
If this custom.bigquery.user role still isn’t limited enough, you can try assigning the bigquery.jobUser role and granting the bigquery.dataset.get, bigquery.tables.get, and bigquery.tables.list permissions at the project level.
Hightouch needs to be able to list the schemas and tables in your BigQuery project when setting up your sync configuration.

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Connect to Google ADH via BigQuery

Go to the Destinations overview page and click the Add destination button. Select Google ADH (Big Query) and click Continue.

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Configure your service account

Select the GCP credentials you previously created or click Create new. To learn more about these credentials, see the Google Cloud Provider (GCP) documentation.

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Configure your destination

Enter the Project ID for the project you enabled the BigQuery API for and the Dataset location.

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Sync configuration

Once you’ve set up your Google ADH (BigQuery) destination and have a model to pull data from, you can set up your sync configuration to begin syncing data. Go to the Syncs overview page and click the Add sync button to begin. Then, select the relevant model and the Google ADH (BigQuery) destination you want to sync to.

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Sync mode

Hightouch supports Insert mode.

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Tips and troubleshooting

To see the exact API requests and responses from each sync run, use the live debugger. To get notified by Slack, PagerDuty, SMS, or email when a sync fails, set up sync alerts. If you run into an issue this page doesn’t cover, .
Last modified on October 23, 2026