What changed for teams sharing conversion data
IAB Tech Lab's ECAPI Working Group has published finalized guidelines for feeding ECAPI events into data clean rooms, a format the group says is ready for implementers. If your team measures conversions inside a clean room alongside a partner, this is the part of the workflow that has been largely improvised until now.
ECAPI stands for Events and Conversion API. The first version of the standard, released in April 2026, dealt with sending conversion data server to server. These new guidelines extend that thinking to the clean room use case, where two or more parties need to match and measure events without handing over raw data.
Why a shared schema matters
A core promise of the ECAPI specification is that everyone defines and labels conversion data the same way. The guidelines carry that idea into clean rooms by establishing a common object format and data schema, so collaborators are not each inventing their own field names and definitions.
That is the practical value here. Fewer mismatched definitions between sender and receiver means less time spent reconciling files and more confidence that both sides are counting the same event. According to IAB Tech Lab, the guidelines are built around Parquet, which the group describes as already an accepted standard for this method.
What the guidelines do not cover
The scope is deliberately narrow. The guidelines address data moving between systems, not how any particular platform stores or processes that data once it arrives. That leaves plenty of room for vendors to differ in what happens next.
Parquet is the focus, and the group lists other ways to get ECAPI events into a clean room: live tables, governed shares, catalog references, streams and APIs. Each may carry its own requirements, and none of them are covered by this release. If your architecture relies on one of those routes, treat these guidelines as a signal of direction rather than an instruction manual.
Alongside the release, IAB Tech Lab says it has clarified how the ECAPI standard handles hashing and encryption. Both matter for clean room work, because matching usually relies on hashed identifiers and encryption governs how records travel safely between parties.
That clarification is not final. The new section is open for public comment as part of ECAPI 1.1, which gives practitioners a chance to weigh in before the language is settled. The announcement was written by Jill Wittkopp, VP, Product at IAB Tech Lab.
Advora perspective
If you run measurement or data partnerships, the sensible next step is to read the finalized guidelines and compare them with whatever schema your clean room integrations use today. The rationale is simple: a shared format only pays off if both sides adopt it, and gaps are easier to spot before a campaign launches than after. Keep the limits in view. The guidelines cover Parquet only, they say nothing about how any single system should process the data, and the hashing and encryption language is still under comment, so it may change.
Teams whose pipelines depend on live tables, governed shares, streams or APIs have less to act on right away, since those methods fall outside this release. Watching the ECAPI 1.1 comment period is worthwhile if identifier handling is central to your setup, but this is editorial judgment, not a promise of what the standard will say. The announcement does not state country or account eligibility, and Advora has not tested any of these implementations.
Read the original announcement
