Tencent Ads Reporting: Dashboards That Answer the Right Question

Tencent’s advertising platform reports the familiar delivery metrics plus some specific to its ecosystem.

• Delivery: impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost, CPM and CPC.
• Engagement: likes, comments, shares and follows on WeChat Moments ads, and follows for Official Accounts.
• Conversion: form submissions, app downloads and activations, Mini Program visits and purchases, add-to-WeChat contact actions.
• Video: views, completion rates and average watch time on Tencent Video and Channels placements.
• Audience: age, gender, region and device breakdowns.

Data can be viewed in the platform, exported as files, or pulled through the Tencent Marketing API for automated reporting.

Before building anything, agree on the questions. Most Tencent ads reports for international brands need to answer some version of these:

• Which placements (Moments, Official Accounts, Mini Programs, Tencent Video, network) deliver the lowest cost per valuable action?
• Which regions and city tiers perform best for our product?
• Are leads or purchases from Tencent ads turning into revenue?
• How does Tencent ads performance compare with other Chinese channels such as Douyin, Baidu or Xiaohongshu?
• Which creatives should we keep, change or stop?

Each question becomes one view or tab. Charts that do not serve one of them go to an appendix or disappear.

Conversion tracking on Tencent depends on where the conversion happens.

Website and H5 pages

Install Tencent’s conversion tracking code on landing pages, often mobile H5 pages, and define actions such as form submission or purchase. Because many Chinese users browse inside the WeChat in-app browser, test tracking there, not only in a desktop browser.

Mini Programs

When the conversion happens inside a WeChat Mini Program, conversion data needs to be connected through Tencent’s data tools so the ad platform can see in-program events. This usually requires work from the Mini Program developer.

Apps

For app campaigns, connect a measurement partner that supports Chinese Android app stores and Tencent’s platform, or use Tencent’s own SDK-based tracking.

Offline and CRM

For lead generation, upload lead outcomes back to the platform where supported, or at least join lead IDs with CRM results in your own reporting.

Many teams export Tencent data into a central tool such as Looker Studio, Power BI or a Chinese BI tool, alongside data from other channels and sales systems.

• Pull daily campaign data through the Marketing API or scheduled exports.
• Standardise campaign names so placement, region and objective can be read from the name.
• Join ad data with CRM or e-commerce data using click IDs, lead IDs or UTM-style parameters.
• Translate field names and campaign labels for non-Chinese-speaking stakeholders.
• Show a comparison period beside each key metric.
• Add a written summary at the top in the language leadership reads.

For illustration, consider a European education provider running WeChat Moments and Official Account ads to recruit students. The weekly report opens with three sentences: lead volume compared with last week, cost per lead by placement and the number of leads the admissions team marked as qualified. A table follows with spend, leads, cost per lead and qualified rate by placement and by city tier. A small chart shows the trend over eight weeks. A creative section lists the three best and three weakest ads, with screenshots and translated copy.

That report answers placement, region, quality and creative questions on a single page. The raw export sits in a linked file for anyone who wants it.

• Counting follows or Mini Program visits as conversions without linking them to revenue.
• Mixing time zones: Chinese platform data runs on China Standard Time, while head-office dashboards may use another zone.
• Comparing placements with different objectives as if they were the same campaign.
• Ignoring currency conversion and VAT when calculating cost per result for global reports.
• Reporting platform numbers without checking them against CRM or e-commerce data.

Attribution across Chinese platforms

Users in China often see a brand on several platforms before converting. A user might see a Moments ad, read a review on Xiaohongshu and buy through a Tmall store. Last-click reporting will undervalue awareness placements. Where possible, track branded search on Baidu and WeChat search during campaigns, and ask leads how they found you.

Frequency depends on budget and decision speed. Teams spending heavily during a launch or a shopping festival such as 618 or Singles’ Day (11.11) may need daily views, because costs and competition change within hours. Steady always-on campaigns usually need a weekly report and a monthly review. Leadership outside China often prefers a monthly summary with a short commentary.

Separate alerts from reports. Set alerts for sudden cost spikes, a campaign that stops delivering or a tracking failure where conversions drop to zero. These need a same-day response. Weekly and monthly reports, by contrast, should be reflective: what changed, why and what the team will try next.

Working with local partners

Many international brands buy Tencent ads through an authorised agency or reseller, which may hold the account. Agree in writing who owns the data, how often exports are shared and in what format. Without this, reports depend on screenshots sent by email, which cannot be joined with sales data and are easy to misread. API access or scheduled file exports to a shared folder solve most of these problems.