Cookies are out, conversions APIs are in

Conversion tracking is crucial for digital advertising as it captures website interactions and powers ad reporting and follow-up marketing actions. Traditional conversion tracking relied on client-side web pixels, which have become less reliable due to privacy laws and technologies. In response, major social media platforms are introducing conversions APIs that allow server-side sharing of events. These APIs offer more powerful and flexible conversion tracking but require time-consuming engineering tasks for implementation. To improve data quality and ad performance with minimal development effort, centralizing all business data in a data warehouse using ELT is recommended. Automated data pipelines like Fivetran can move conversion events to the data warehouse, while reverse ETL services like Hightouch can send these events to conversions APIs. This approach minimizes marketing downtime and provides an immediate return on investment.