As marketers push for more consistent measurement and outcome based optimization across channels, the digital advertising industry is facing growing integration complexity. IAB Tech Lab has taken a step toward addressing that challenge with the announcement of the Event and Conversion API, or ECAPI, a new technical specification designed to standardize how marketing events and conversions are shared across platforms, partners, and emerging AI driven systems.
IAB Tech Lab said the Event and Conversion API will be open for public comment until Friday, February 20, 2026. The goal is to gather broad industry feedback and refine the specification to support adoption across advertisers, ad platforms, and technology providers. ECAPI is intended to create a shared foundation for communicating full funnel marketing events, from early engagement signals through lower funnel conversion outcomes.
“ECAPI is about reducing friction and creating a shared foundation the industry can actually build on,” said Anthony Katsur, CEO of 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 events that advertisers can send in a consistent format to advertising platforms, measurement partners, and AI agents. By aligning how these events are structured and transmitted, ECAPI aims to support campaign optimization tied directly to business objectives while improving measurement clarity across the entire marketing funnel.
Today, many major platforms operate proprietary conversion APIs. While effective in isolation, these solutions often require custom development when advertisers work with multiple partners. Over time, this leads to duplicated effort, higher costs, and systems that are difficult to scale, particularly as new use cases such as agentic buying and outcome based automation emerge.
ECAPI is designed to reduce that burden by offering a flexible but consistent framework that can support different business needs without forcing advertisers to rebuild integrations repeatedly. IAB Tech Lab said the specification is built to evolve alongside industry requirements, allowing for specialization while preserving interoperability. The API will also be incorporated into the organization’s broader agentic roadmap, supporting future models of outcomes based buying and selling using measurable goals and automated agents.
Industry leaders have welcomed the move toward a shared standard. “Open standards for Conversion API support innovation and interoperability across the digital advertising ecosystem,” said Steven Ware Jones, Business Engineer at Meta. “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.”
Barbara Kalicki, Associate Director at Publicis Sapient, added that ECAPI creates a common language that allows teams to focus on improving data quality rather than rebuilding similar solutions. With the Event and Conversion API now open for public comment, IAB Tech Lab is inviting the industry to help shape a standard that could streamline measurement, enable agentic optimization, and improve outcomes across digital advertising.
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