We’re an industry focused on outcomes. Every outcome has specific, measurable events that lead to the overarching goal.
This focus led to the Event & Conversion API (commonly known as CAPI) standard, which was finalized in April this year. It was designed to standardize communication of marketing-related events from advertisers’ systems to advertising platforms and partners. The recipients can leverage this information to optimize marketing campaigns toward desired outcomes and to better measure and report on marketing campaign performance across complete marketing funnels.
As implementers dug in, common use cases about how this data was shared were brought forward. The key takeaway: these marketing events are commonly analyzed with partners via data clean rooms.
The data clean room use case doesn’t warrant its own standard. The events necessary for measurement and optimization are the same for this workflow as for the server-to-server integration outlined by the core specification. There were enough nuances to the way the event data is packaged for data clean room workflows that guidance seemed beneficial.
The ultimate goal of the ECAPI Guidelines for Data Clean Rooms is to help scale and expedite these integrations.
Core areas where these guidelines help:
- Hashing and encryption – data protection is critical, these guidelines help streamline communication for how to decrypt and access
- Parquet schemas and how to use them – highlights when its necessary to use nested vs fully denormalized as a best practice
- Partitioning – provides a common understanding of how various partitioning schemes could be supported and best practices around usage
- File metadata – core pieces of information for those sending and receiving the data to be aware of, streamlines communication and allows the data set to be processed as the sender expects
These guidelines were developed by the ECAPI Working Group to ensure smooth application of the ECAPI standard to these data transfer use cases. The guidelines focus on data moving between systems, not how the data should be stored within any specific system. As the industry continues to focus on outcomes and collaborate around the events that drive those outcomes, we expect use cases to evolve. We’re eager to hear from you on Data Clean Rooms. The guidelines are open for public comment until September 4, 2026.
Jill Wittkopp
VP, Product
IAB Tech Lab