IAB Tech Lab, the global digital advertising technical standard-setting body, announced the Event and Conversion API (ECAPI), a new technical specification designed to standardize how marketing-related events and measurable outcomes are communicated from advertiser systems to advertising platforms and partners.
“ECAPI is about reducing friction and creating a shared foundation the industry can actually build on,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO, IAB Tech Lab. “Advertisers and platforms are already doing this work in parallel today. This specification brings consistency to how full-funnel events are defined and shared, so teams can spend less time managing integrations and more time focusing on measurable results and testing agentic optimization of outcomes. We want the industry to pressure test it, challenge it, and help us make it stronger during the public comment period.”
The Event and Conversion API defines a standardized set of full-funnel events that are meaningful to advertisers, from upper-funnel engagement through lower-funnel conversion activity. By enabling advertisers to send these events in a consistent format to platforms, partners, and AI agents, ECAPI supports campaign optimization toward specific business goals while also improving measurement and insight across the marketing funnel.
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Many advertising platforms operate their own versions of Conversion APIs. While these solutions can be effective individually, integrating with multiple partners often requires custom development work due to differences in structure and requirements. Over time, that complexity can become costly and difficult to scale, especially as new use cases emerge, such as agentic buying based around outcomes.
ECAPI addresses this challenge by providing a flexible but consistent framework that reduces implementation effort while supporting a wide range of use cases. The specification is designed to scale with industry needs and allows for specialization without requiring entirely new custom integrations. This approach helps advertisers and platforms work more efficiently while improving the quality of data used to drive performance and return on investment. ECAPI will also be built directly into the IAB Tech Lab agentic roadmap so that outcomes-based buying and selling with measurable goals using agents can become a reality.
“Open standards for Conversion API support innovation and interoperability across the digital advertising ecosystem. Working with industry to provide a consistent framework to understand marketing outcomes helps marketers gain deeper insights and enhance campaign effectiveness, while supporting privacy and transparency for people,” said Steven Ware Jones, Business Engineer, Meta.
“ECAPI creates a shared language that can reduce integration overhead while still supporting innovation,” said Barbara Kalicki, Associate Director, Publicis Sapient. “It allows retailers and platforms to focus on improving the value of the data being exchanged rather than rebuilding similar solutions again and again.”
SOURCE: IAB Tech Lab