IAB Tech Lab’s Privacy & Addressability event: Signal Shift returns in 2025 after sold out events in 2024. It’s a full day of presentations, technical demos, and panel discussions on the issues facing the industry. Expect an in-depth conversation on Conversion APIs (CAPI), Privacy Enhancing Technologies, ID-less, future addressability solutions, and how to ensure your company is compliant with privacy regulations.
Imagine asking someone to help you build a piece of IKEA furniture without sharing the instructions or the perfectly sized Allen wrench included in the package. The person might come close to assembling it correctly if you simply say it’s a bookshelf. They might get even closer when you specify that it’s a vertical, six-shelf bookcase in brown. Still, they could end up frustrated—pulling their hair out and expressing colorful thoughts—when you reveal that you knew exactly what they needed to do all along.
This illustrates a common problem in digital advertising. Advertisers want publishers to help them find their target audience, they’re paying publishers to do so. But they don’t always arm publishers with concrete examples of converting customers. There are valid reasons for why this can and cannot be done, but a common challenge we’ve heard is that every publisher integration is different.
Enter CAPI:
It only makes sense the advertiser would want to arm their publisher partners with the key to achieving the agreed upon outcomes. CAPIs are customized per platform today. Which means resources are needed to build to each publisher an advertiser decides to send conversions to. Our effort will help streamline this and ensure it is as easy as possible for advertisers to implement with multiple business partners.
What is CAPI?
CAPI is not new, many publishers today have conversion apis available for their advertiser partners.
Meta says: The Conversions API is designed to create a connection between an advertiser’s marketing data (such as website events, app events, business messaging events and offline conversions) from an advertiser’s server, website platform, mobile app, or CRM to Meta systems that optimize ad targeting, decrease cost per result and measure outcomes.
Yahoo says: The Yahoo Conversion API can be used to send transaction data for campaign measurement, attribution, and optimization.
Pinterest says: The Pinterest Conversions API enables advertisers to send conversions directly to Pinterest via a server-to-server connection. Conversions captured with the Pinterest API can then be used for campaign optimization, targeting and conversion reporting for improved conversion visibility.
With all this activity on the publisher side, and the critical signal conversion event declaration can provide for optimization, Tech Lab has been asked to help standardize the API itself.
If it Already Exists, Why Change it?
The goal of standardization is to remove friction and overhead cost when it comes to scaling. Today, an advertiser that wants to share conversion events with a publisher partner has to do custom integrations with each of those publisher partners.
A single, industry designed CAPI would mean that advertisers don’t have to customize taxonomy, nomenclature, data structure for each publisher partner’s proprietary API. Advertisers or Agencies can do the integration once, and decide which partners to send it to.
It was the same type of problem we saw with OpenRTB. If a DSP is plugging into an SSP, and each integration is proprietary, that’s a lot of overhead on each developing and maintaining each integration. Once the standard request/response protocol exists, the integration discussions start from a more grounded place.
What is Tech Lab Doing?
As part of our 2025 roadmap, we aim to release a v1 of an industry standard conversion API under our Measurement pillar. We would love to ensure all voices are heard as we work through existing solutions in the ecosystem for standardization. If you’re interested in joining the working group, register here.
The working group will kick off in March 2025, with a deliverable target 2H 2025.
If you want to learn more, join us at Signal Shift: Addressability in the Privacy Era, March 20, 2025, Tickets Available Here.
Jill Wittkopp
VP, Product Management
IAB Tech Lab