So much goes into generating leads, nurturing, and converting those leads into returning customers. Marketing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) help digital marketers, who play a significant role in progressing leads through the sales funnel, streamline this process, ensuring better coordination, efficiency, and results. 

This article delves into everything a marketer needs to know about APIs, addressing what an API is, how APIs work, types of APIs, categories of digital marketing APIs, and how to properly evaluate third-party APIs before integration.  

What’s an API and How Does it Work? 

An API is a set of rules that define how computers, applications, or machines can interact with each other. In simpler terms, an API is like a messenger that takes your message (request) to a server and returns a response to your request. Through an API, two computer applications can talk to each other over a network in a language they both understand. 

Tom Johnson, a technical writer with Google, uses an analogy on his blog that provides a clear and practical example of how API request and response works. According to him, suppose you want to view a pay-per-view event that requires payment. A pop-up dialogue might appear, letting you enter your credit card details. 

Your payment gets processed, and you receive confirmation about the purchase’s success. This payment processing doesn’t occur within the app. Instead, the app makes API calls out to payment servers with the needed information, and all that payment processing happens in the cloud. When the processing finishes, the API returns a confirmation response.

In Tom Johnson’s analogy above, the request happens when the user enters their credit card details. The data that returns to them confirming payment is the response. These actions are already predefined, which means specific actions trigger specific responses or behaviours. This reduces the chances of someone doing something sinister or requesting sensitive data, such as passwords. Any requests outside of the predefined behaviours of an API will return an error response. 

The API’s protocol and architecture (also known as format) dictate the rules, structures, and constraints that govern its operation.

Different Types of API Architecture

1. REST style 

REST, an acronym for Representational State Transfer, is the most popular API architecture because it’s flexible, lightweight, and easy to implement. Designed for services, the REST style adheres to specific concepts and rules. 

For one, the REST style takes the client/server approach, delivering resource requests and responses via HTTP. For another, the REST style is stateless. This means every time a user makes a request it happens in total isolation. Every request is a stand-alone. 

The server never saves any information from previous requests. But the server response can be cached in the client so that the client doesn’t have to make repeated requests for the same resource. This makes the user experience faster and more efficient. 

2. SOAP style

Like REST, SOAP is also a type of web API standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). But unlike REST, SOAP APIs are harder to implement because they’re heavy with code and resource intensive. 

SOAP is more secure than REST and supports most communication protocols, including SMTP, TCP, HTTP, and more. Also, SOAP is strict in its definition of how messages can be sent and what must be included. 

3. RPC style

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is an architectural style with two protocols: JSON-RPC and XML-RPC. The former uses Javascript Object Notation (JSON) to encode calls, while the latter uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML). 

Both are simple protocols similar to REST, with a few key differences. RPC protocol is action-oriented and is designed to call methods. Also, with RPC, the URL identifies the server and has no information in its parameters. 

Types of API

Generally, there are four main types of API:

1. Internal APIs

These types of APIs are also known as private APIs. Companies develop them for their internal use to improve their products and services. Only those within the company can use these APIs. 

For example, The New York Times API started as a private API. “The NYT API grew out of a need to make our own internal content management system more accessible so that we could get the most out of our content,” said Derek Willis, former Newsroom Developer at the Times. 

“The API offered a way to give people more access to create more interesting pieces. We are the biggest users of our own APIs, and that’s not by accident. The API helps our business in other ways: creating brand awareness and helping us attract talent. But fundamentally, it helps us do our own jobs better.”

2. Open APIs

Also known as public APIs, these types of APIs are open for public use. There is no restriction to access, though some may require registration and API keys. Some examples of open APIs include Whether API, IMDb API, and Google Translate API. 

3. Partner APIs

Partner APIs are not available to the public. Companies usually create these APIs with more robust authentication and authorization mechanisms. They allow others outside the company to use them with permission. 

Typically, access is granted to facilitate a partnership and collaboration between the companies. Some examples of partner APIs include eBays API, Amazon API, and Twitter’s Elevated+ API, which is only available to licensed partners. 

4. Composite APIs

Different data and service APIs make up composite APIs. As a result, developers can access several endpoints in a single call, and users can perform one operation with multiple services. This increases efficiency because the number of calls is kept to a bare minimum. 

Composite APIs are typically used in microservices where a single operation requires data from multiple APIs. Postman Collections is an excellent example of composite API, which allows users to pack multiple calls into a single query. 

Categories of Digital Marketing APIs

Putting digital marketing APIs in well-defined categories can help digital marketers search for the ideal API for their specific marketing needs. Below are the categories of digital marketing API. 

1. SEO APIs

Search engine optimization (SEO) APIs enable digital marketers to collect data from different platforms quickly. 

There are so many things digital marketers can do with SEO APIs. Some of these include competitor content analysis, backlinks monitoring, keyword research, content curation, SEO slug creation, domain authority check, search results scraping from search engines, extracting major SEO tags, and getting real-time optimization data. 

Beyond all that, digital marketers can also use APIs to resolve complex technical SEO issues, an area Jérôme Salomon spoke about at the 2022 BrightonSEO conference. 

As a case study, during his presentation, Jérôme provides a tutorial on monitoring the technical SEO of a large website but on specific page types only, using Google Search Console API and Zapier. This is a great example of how APIs can help you find your way around difficult technical SEO problems. 

Some SEO APIs include Serpstat, Zenserp, Moz, Zara 4, GeoRanker, SEO Explorer, Website Worth, MySiteAuditor, Seobility DeepCrawl, BuiltWith, and CognitiveSEO.    

2. Chat and messenger APIs

As the name implies, Messenger APIs send messages to users in different formats, including attachments, push notifications, templates, and texts. While chat APIs are used to provide real-time chatting, either in-app or on a website. 

Offering live support to customers is a widespread use case of Chat APIs. For Messenger APIs, a general use case is sending promotional SMS directly to users’ mobile phones. 

Real-world APIs used for chatting and messaging include PubNub’s in-app chat API, Meta’s Send API, Messente, Fleep, Sinch, TalkJS, and CometChat.  

3. Social media APIs

Digital marketers use social media to reach existing and prospective customers and vice versa, which makes it a key part of digital marketing. According to Statista, over 91% of marketers do business on social media and 75% of internet users use social media to research products (DataReportal, 2022).

Through social media APIs, provided mainly by social media networks, digital marketers access additional functionalities. These functionalities allow them to schedule and make posts, monitor, collect and integrate different kinds of data, including content, demographic, and user data. Such information drives process and product improvement, thereby enhancing social connection, brand reach, and equity.  

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Discord, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Telegram, TikTok, and Tumblr all have different API offerings for businesses.  

4. Segmentation APIs 

Segmentation is the act of assigning existing and prospective customers to different groups based on age, gender, location, buying behaviours, attitudes, lifestyle, or any other categorization that fits your needs. 

Segmentation APIs use selected criteria to separate data into smaller groups. This allows you to know your customers better, use resources wisely, personalize customer service, acquire and retain more customers, and avoid markets that aren’t profitable.  

Some examples of real-world APIs for audience segmentation include CleverTap API, ibexa Segmentation API, Acoustic Segment API, Google Ads Segmentation, and Segment API. 

5. Analytics APIs

As a digital marketer, most of what you do requires you to analyze to know what’s working and what isn’t. This is where analytics APIs come in. 

Analytics APIs enable digital marketers to analyze large data systematically. This provides valuable insights that help them evolve processes, make calculated predictions, find trends and patterns, create custom reports, and generally guide their decision-making. 

For instance, with an API like MailChimpAPI, digital marketers can link the statistics of a campaign to their database by synchronizing email activities. Google Analytics API is another excellent example of analytics API. 

With Google Analytics API, digital marketers can measure user interactions on websites and web applications. Other analytics APIs include Looker API, Ahrefs API, and Microsoft Text Analytics API, which can be used to analyze sentiment and perform keyphrase extraction, entity linking, and language detection.

How to Properly Evaluate Digital Marketing APIs

APIs differ in various ways. Some can make integration a breezy affair, proving to be a worthwhile investment. While others can become a nightmare, and difficult to integrate and use, constituting a waste of resources. 

So as a digital marketer, it’s critical to properly evaluate an API before integrating it into your systems. Below are tips on how to assess digital marketing APIs. 

1. Does it have accurate documentation? 

Before adopting an API, check to make sure it has proper documentation. An API without adequate documentation is like going into a restaurant and being presented with a menu that contains meals the restaurant doesn’t serve. 

Think of the documentation as a manual that instructs you on how to use the API effectively and tells you everything you can do with the API. Good API documentation should have an overview that describes the functions of the API. Plus a Getting Started section that details the first steps of using the API. It should indicate the data format and authentication mechanism. 

Additionally, it should also link to the reference documentation. There you’d generally find a description of the information returned by the API, various endpoints and methods, parameters, request examples, response examples, and schema. 

Some API documentation also includes error handling information, plus an API explorer that allows you to try out endpoints and receive responses.

2. How’s the reputation of the API vendor?

Before choosing a third-party API for your digital marketing needs, you want to know the vendor’s reputation. Carry out thorough research to know the frequency of their service disruptions and whether they keep their documentation up to date. 

You also want to know which other organizations are using the API. Are those organizations renowned or unknown with a spare digital footprint? You want to know if the API is newly designed. You really don’t want to be the first company to integrate the new API. 

First, there’s the danger of such an API provider going out of business. Plus, it’d require so much testing, and you’re likely to find so many issues that’ll end up costing you more resources down the line.  

Furthermore, visit independent customer service platforms and see what’s being said about the API. Prioritize companies with API-first design principles whose core competency is API development. “API providers whose technology is built on an API-first design tend to fare a lot better in terms of usability, functionality, and the overall developer experience,” notes Nimit Sawhney, co-founder of Voatz, a mobile voting Platform. 

3. Does it have technical and language support? 

Technical and language support are crucial factors to consider before going ahead with a third-party API. You want to be sure they have a library and software development kit (SDK) in your preferred language. 

Libraries are important because they offer core functionalities such as media download and upload, HTTP transport, batching to the API, error handling, JSON parsing, and authentication. Kristopher Sandoval, a web developer and author who writes on security and business, has a great analogy that describes SDKs. 

According to him, when putting together a model car or plane, you need a whole kit of items, including the kit pieces themselves, the tools required to put them together, assembly instructions, and so on. An SDK functions the same way. It provides relevant documentation, code samples, libraries, processes, and guides that enable you to go outside the scope of what the API would allow.

So before investing in any third-party API, find out if they have an SDK, their library size, and whether the API has dependencies or conflicts. You also want to know whether the library is written and documented by the vendor. If it’s outsourced, check to ascertain its maturity. 

Beyond language support, technical support is also invaluable. You want to know if the API vendor has a dedicated community forum, an outage report page, and their medium of providing support. Is it through emails or phone calls? Can you call or email them at any time? Are responses swift, or do they take time? Usually, smaller API vendors hardly offer robust technical support. 

4. What’s their pricing model?

Regarding pricing, it may seem like a no-brainer to go with the cheapest API vendor. But it’s not that straightforward. Some API vendors charge monthly, while others charge on a per-request basis. So determining your expected usage would help you settle on a pricing model. 

If the API vendor charges monthly, you want to know if there’s a cap to the number of requests you can make per day or month. If they charge per request, find out how much the vendor charges for additional requests. You also want to know if you can monitor requests through any tools or services. 

The ideal API vendor has a free plan alongside other pricing plans. The free model allows you to test the API’s capabilities before making any monetary commitment.   

5. What’s their policy around data and security?

Data transits between the API vendor and your service when using a third-party API. Hence, the need for robust data security and policy is of utmost importance because an API with a security hole can compromise your data.

First, check if the API vendor has a privacy policy page. Go through it to know how long they keep your data on their server and whether they share it with another third party. You also want to review their protocols for authentication and communication. Fortunately, there are many security testing tools to help you test the security of the API. 

Wrapping up

After settling on a third-party API, it’s also essential to keep the maintenance of the API and future migration in mind. During integration, remove the vendor’s naming convention and design your system to support two API providers simultaneously. This way, you have multi-provider and fallback support.

If you have any questions or concerns, kindly use the comments section below.