The IAB Tech Lab has opened its Event and Conversion API (ECAPI) for public comment, taking a significant step toward standardising how full-funnel marketing events and conversions are defined, shared, and measured across the digital advertising ecosystem. The feedback window will remain open until February 20, 2026, giving advertisers, platforms, agencies, and tech partners time to pressure-test the framework.
At its core, ECAPI is designed to solve a growing industry problem: fragmentation. Today, advertisers and platforms build parallel, often incompatible systems to track events across media, commerce, and conversion layers. This leads to duplicated effort, higher integration costs, and inconsistent measurement especially as privacy constraints and server-side data flows become the norm.
By introducing a shared, open specification, ECAPI aims to create a common language for full-funnel outcomes, allowing teams to focus less on plumbing and more on performance optimisation, experimentation, and AI-led decisioning. As Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, noted, the goal is to reduce friction while enabling agentic optimisation of outcomes, where AI systems can test, learn, and improve campaigns in real time.
Importantly, the initiative has drawn early support from major ecosystem players. Meta highlighted ECAPI’s role in enabling interoperability, privacy, and transparency, while Publicis Sapient pointed to its potential to reduce repetitive rebuilds and shift focus toward data quality and value creation.
The timing matters. As advertising moves toward outcome-based buying, retail media integration, and AI-driven optimisation, standardised event frameworks are becoming foundational infrastructure rather than optional tooling. ECAPI signals the industry’s intent to collaborate on that foundation before fragmentation becomes irreversible.
If widely adopted, ECAPI could quietly become one of the most important building blocks for the next phase of AI-powered, full-funnel marketing.
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