What analysis can Chinese advertising-platform data APIs support?
The APIs for Xiaohongshu Spotlight, Ocean Engine, Tencent Ads, and Baidu Marketing can support delivery monitoring, funnel efficiency, account and creative ranking, available audience or traffic breakdowns, conversion cost, budget pacing, and multi-account reporting. They primarily expose platform-attributed aggregate data. Profit, customer lifetime value, and incremental effect require order, CRM, and experiment data.
Platforms commonly return date plus account, campaign/project, ad group/unit, ad, creative, or keyword dimensions and impressions, clicks, spend, and conversions. A standard layer can calculate CTR, CPM, CPC, CVR, CPA, ROAS, and pacing. Similar field names do not guarantee the same conversion window, deduplication, reporting state, currency unit, or freshness.
When decomposing features, data, and acceptance scenarios, also compare What can and cannot be automated when publishing product listings across marketplaces? and Who is responsible for requirements during a software project?; the linked guidance adds context that should be considered in the same decision.
| Platform | Useful emphasis | Verify before integration |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaohongshu Spotlight | Content/creative, search/keyword, engagement and lead trend | Metrics available for the chosen objective, authorization, offline/realtime report behavior |
| Ocean Engine | Video and creative decay, viewing/engagement funnel, leads/apps, hourly spend | Product line—Marketing, Qianchuan, Local, Xingtu—and its separate permissions |
| Tencent Ads | WeChat/Tencent-media trend, placement/traffic, creative and conversion cost | API version, reporting fields, product and permission group |
| Baidu Marketing | Search query/keyword, matching, geography/time, search and feed conversion | Separate search/feed structure and boundary from Baidu Analytics and first-party conversion |
The official entry points remain available as rechecked on 26 August 2026: Xiaohongshu's Spotlight help center, Ocean Engine's business open platform, Tencent's official Marketing API Java SDK, and Baidu's business developer center. Availability for a specific account must still be proven by OAuth and a real schema/report request.
The resulting system can monitor spend and delivery, locate funnel drop-off, drill from group totals to ads and creatives, label and compare creative decay, analyze available search/traffic dimensions, split supported audience/region/device/time, reconcile platform conversions against site events and CRM sales, and compare channels after normalizing date, time zone, currency, account, product, and conversion definitions.
An API does not usually provide identified individuals and should not be used to reconstruct them. Platform-attributed conversion is not incremental causality, and the value reported by media is not automatically collected revenue. Refunds, cancellation, margin, offline sales, repeat purchase, and LTV live in business systems. Use lawful conversion identifiers where available; use holdouts or geographic experiments for incrementality.
Start with exports and spreadsheets while definitions change. Use API, a lightweight database, and fixed dashboards for multiple accounts and daily work. Add a warehouse plus CRM/orders and experimentation only when profit and incrementality decisions justify the governance and identity cost.
Wavesteam delivers a platform-account-metric-definition matrix, preserves raw responses, creates a versioned standard layer without overwriting source values, and exposes formulas and freshness. Acceptance reconciles spend, date, hierarchy, time zone, currency, conversion window, late updates, pagination, rate limits, token expiry, async failures, and backfills against representative live accounts. A chart existing on screen is not acceptance; differences must be traceable to a documented platform meaning.