Transcript:

Hey. Thanks for joining. Great to see the turnout. So joining me today, are Katie Dombrowski from Pinterest.

Jenlynn Lee from TikTok and Rachel Mall from Snap.

Awesome. So, this is a hot topic clearly based on the attendance we have here.

I would love to start with a bit of background before we get into the heart of the topic. And just for anyone here who's not that familiar with what we're broadly referring to as conversions APIs or events APIs, what is this?

And can you tell us a bit more about your offering here? And I'll I'll start with Katie from Pinterest.

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Nice to see all these folks. So just to give you a bit of background, if you're not a power Pinterest user, Pinterest is a unique discovery platform, and Pinterest sits at this intersection between inspiration discovery, shopping, and and and search. And so because of all that behavior on our platform, form.

We have always been known as a great platform to drive branding, to drive inspiration, to drive discovery. And we really have a new era at Pinterest where we're focusing on driving performance and real lower funnel performance for brands. And so with that, we've been developing and building a lot of different performance products, including things like direct links, which takes you right from the app, right into the website, mobile deep linking, as well as conversions API, sorry, Pinterest API for conversions, which is a mouse So I think I'm gonna say Kathy from now on if everyone's good with that.

And so what conversions API does is is helps advertisers in, as we know, a cookie less future, have a more privacy resilient view into both the transactions conversion activity, as well as the audiences and the data that is needed to drive, high performance ad spend.

So Pinterest has been investing in that solution, since we launched it officially in two thousand twenty two. And, it's the most it's sort of the foundational way. Right? If you think about putting a tag on your site was ten, twenty years ago, Hinch the API solution really is the foundational privacy resilient solution for advertisers to to have high fidelity, conversion visibility, And the one thing I'll say, we're really excited to announce with LiveRamp this week, that we have a new solution partnering with LiveRamp that allows advertisers who, have the authenticated traffic solution, so ATS to actually launch and build the Cappy integration without having to be, as open and detailed in the privacy data that they're sharing.

So using RAM ID, you can implement Kathy with Pinterest and it's really building on. We have a clean room integration with LiveRAMP as well, and we're really just trying to have as many resilient, privacy safe integrations with, our partners. And so I think we're today, the first partner that has both the clean room integration with LiveRAMP as well as this ATS Kathy solution. So pretty excited, and we've been very much focused on this as a company.

Thanks, Katie. We're excited as well.

Think you gave a great overview of what these APIs are and what they do. So I'll I'll turn to to Rachel, and and next, I wanna just define the boundaries of the use case here. Are these just four conversions, or do they do more than that?

Yeah. Absolutely.

Also, thank you. For joining us. Certainly never expected this kind of crowd post lunch on the final day of conference.

Capi is, the hot topic this year. It appears.

For us, I think the way that we think about it is, as the name connotates, of course, your conversion data is the core of what a CAPppy integration looks like, especially at Snap.

There's, you know, plenty of use cases for what we think fundamentally about measurement, thinking about the audience sizes, and certainly really giving you that opportunity to leverage your first party data in the most effective way possible.

That is certainly not the only that we have at Snap. Plenty of other, tools and suites for you if you are interested in other parts of, the data whether it be the marketing API, the ads API, it feels like just about everything is API accessible these days, which is obviously, the easiest way for a lot of our developers and marketers who work more closely with us in a way that's more streamlined.

Thank you.

I mean, Chen Lynn Katie, Katie, what what would you add there?

Are there other ways that you see marketers using the events API at TikTok or the API for conversions at at Pinterest?

Yep. From from the TikTok annual. First of all, we actually call it events API because there's actually what we view it as a way to kind of enable the activation of first party, any kind of event data, whether it's CRM data, web data, app data, and to be able to use that for all the use cases that a traditional cookie enables and then more. Right? So we obviously optimize targeting, measurement, those are all able to be enabled and scaled by working through CAPI events API, API.

Again, I'm gonna put you in the spot a little bit here. When we were prepping for this, you had a good anecdote about how the cookie came to be as something that was used in it for advertising.

You talk the group through that and like how you see the events API as a better evolution. Yeah.

So afternoon at last day of conference. Right? So, a little bit of trivia.

The cookie was never designed for ads. Right. I don't know, how many of you guys know this. But, like, originally, when the cookie came about, it was designed to capture the state of a web page.

Right. So if you remember the, you know, aging myself, netscape, by Firefox, Chrome, whatever, you click on a link. It turns from blue to purple. Right?

That kind of information is actually captured in a cookie to know that you've been there before. And like, over time, ad tech is kind of hacked it and hacked it to enable all the use cases, some nefarious, mostly good. That we, you know, utilize today in digital advertising. And I think the thing about APIs, events APIs, coverage of APIs, they're designed with the intent of facilitating digital ads.

Right? So that's kind of the biggest takeaway. Obviously, it's modern. It's, it's safer it's designed to today, and it wasn't a, you know, a hack from the original design intent.

And that opens up environments like Safari like, combining online and in store, Katie anything to add to that?

Or I was the only thing I was gonna add, which may may be obvious, but just wanna state it, is that you know, a tag based solution is online only actions for the most part. I think our conversions API and all of ours, I believe, allow you to onboard both online and offline conversion data or events data, which makes a much more holistic and robust, set of foundational data. So I think that's to your point. It's very intentional to build advertising solutions as opposed to sort of reactionary to what's available digitally.

Makes a lot of sense. From my point of view, it's clear that these APIs fill a critical need, but let's get into some of the stats that that we've seen you're talking to customers, what are some of the ways that you demonstrate the results of using, and I'll start with the the events API for for your general limit?

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So for for the cars, for the advertisers who have adapted and implemented, events API, we're seeing about, you know, nineteen percent or so maybe a bit more increase in tracking accuracy, which leads to, you know, without doing anything different, fifteen percent or even more, in the in in CPA, just because you'll be able to measuring more dollars, right, more more activity.

Alright. So that's kinda on the campaign performance perspective, but I actually wanna draw attention to the things that don't happen. Right? So I think number one, it's, it's more reliable.

Right, as a, as a integration.

So you're getting the consistency and reliability of that signal coming in.

There's a little bit of build up front, so you have to build it. But once it's built, it's it's there.

And then, like, it also it's it's it's, like I mentioned earlier, it's kind of more modern and designed with privacy in mind. Right? So it's all the stuff that don't happen. It doesn't happen. There's no breaches, you're not paying penalties, things like that. So I almost there's a value here and what doesn't happen as well.

Yeah. That's a really clear value prop.

Katie, I know you had a a stat that you released on your earnings I'd love for you to share as well.

Happy to. And it's great to hear. I think our similar stats are very in line. So it's nice to see that there's consistent success.

So a brand that we work closely with, Pac Sun, which is a omnichannel retailer that, is very focused on targeting the gen z audience. Once they implemented cappy on Pinterest, they actually saw a seven fold increase in conversion rate. So again, that's not that those things weren't happening. It's giving higher fidelity and visibility into what's already happening.

So the PAC Sun example is a really strong exam of the increase in conversion rate that you can see. And then more broadly, the average increase in, sorry, as fourteen percent is the average decrease in CPA. So similar to, I think you're fifteen percent. Like, we're seeing the average cost per act action, being, you know, be improved by fourteen percent.

And then on the conversion volume side, right, just how many conversions are we able to see and attribute, the average there is thirty six percent increase. So when you think about all the activities or the, initiatives you're focused on to kind of improve performance and also give you better signal on where to invest and where not to. I think I hope it's obvious that implementing and finding the resources, to build for Cappy across platforms is very is time very well spent. And as you can hear, like, Pinterest is so focused on building that lower funnel visibility so we can drive and and demonstrate performance advertiser.

So I just wanted to I think hopefully those stats are compelling, but it sounds like across the board, it it's pretty universal.

I I'd look for you to expand on that process of building to this.

What do you see as the biggest barriers to doing that? Why do you think that every advertiser in the room here isn't already using your API for conversions.

Yeah. I mean, you guys can all share your stories. I I think, like, resources are the number one, right, finding the dev development resources, finding the funding if you don't have those individuals at your company or your team already, So by by far and away, and and we know that it can add weeks, months, you know, even a year plus onto the timeline because of just you're trying to allocate the the engineering or developer resources. So Pinterest is really focused on a number of incentives, whether that's monetary incentives, to help fund some of those developer resources, connecting with third party developers, and also the HTS solution we're building with LiveRAMP is one that should make it much more turnkey.

Right? If you already are leveraging that RAM ID, there isn't a huge integration or setup. It should just be enabling, that kind of privacy save connection. So those are a couple of ways, but I would love to hear where you guys are hearing blockers.

Oh, and the stat I didn't share, which maybe is interesting.

At the end of twenty twenty two, only fourteen percent of our total revenue was API enabled, by August of twenty twenty three. So not even a year, about twenty eight percent, of our revenue was API enabled, conversion API enabled, but that's still a long way to go. Right? And so I think that it's very clear that it's not universally adapted yet. So no one here is behind the eight ball, you have time to kinda be ahead of the curve. So I would say it the time is now, but definitely lean on your platform partners to help you find ways to shorten that path because it really shouldn't take that long. But the developer resources are what's really blocking in most cases.

Yeah. I'll add on to that. I think that certainly the dev resources key.

But there's actually a lot of, education. I would suggest some education and internal alignment on this. Right? I think the the use cases aren't necessarily that new.

But the, I guess, the tech in the process is new. So, you know, learn more about this, educate cross functionally anywhere from legal, privacy, obviously, the, the, the, the, the, teams that your respective companies.

I think that you could certainly start with just, like, better understanding what this is and how much money is gonna get involved.

Right?

Similarly, we have multiple initiatives to support the the advertiser in developing their, supporting their ability to, integrate with, with our events API. So anywhere from, like, supporting, direct integrations with us with our own technical resources.

We, enlist the help of a partner ecosystem as well.

To to kind of help with the the the dev work. And then we're always trying to find ways to reduce the lift, the the technical lift. And, I don't know if, we're gonna see a self serve type integration, in the next quarter or two, but like, well, or keeping the, lower the barrier of adoption.

Yeah. I think that the easiest way to summarize what we see is the most common blockers is the lack of understanding around what the true value prop of Cappy is. I think for someone who's on the ground, thinking about this every day, like the three of us are lucky to do.

Conversions API kinda seems like the no brainer, especially given where we're moving towards in terms of cookie deprecation on Chrome, and other, obviously, regulatory and platform changes that are happening. I think for for a second one, and and they've both spoken to this, the technical resourcing of it all. I think this is where those partner integrations with folks like LiveRAMP and other partners that are really becoming those service model providers for conversions API integrations are really removing the need to have those in house dev resources that may or may not be available or may be vertized other business needs.

And then certainly, you know, you have, as a marketer, your choice of how you leverage various ad platforms. And so if certain ad platforms, may not be, you know, your bread and butter or the majority of your spend. It might not be a urgent priority to be, integrating that cappy integration, but still remains to be something that we see quite a lot of value in. And then I think finally, and and truthfully, the hardest conversation that we probably have is the privacy conversation of am I willing to be sharing hash PII with, you know, said partner, and I think that's something where then, you know, clean rooms comes into the conversation, but certainly something that we're all cognizant of and wanting to be privacy centric when we're thinking about these integration setups.

Yeah. I'm I'm glad you bring up the interaction between the clean room and the API because I think that there is this misconception out there that advertisers need to pick one or the other.

And in reality, I think you all have a different view than that. So, I mean, Rachel, I'd love for you to talk more about What do you see as the ideal interaction between, the conversions API and the use of the clean room?

Yeah. Absolutely. The way and I was thinking about this on the the Uber ride over here of, like, how to metaphorically put this. But in my head, I think of Cappy as sort of, like, the bread and butter foundation, which everything else is built on. There's always going to be a case by case basis for certain advertisers who are privately privacy sensitive, or wanting to ensure that there is that sort of third party in our media area for hash PII in a way that protects them and so protects that end endpoint.

So I think of data clean rooms as kind of being that armored car. It's a bit of an escort when we're thinking about, you know, how cappy is being, you know, run and focused on that first party data. I see it as being a very complimentary setup. Of course, I don't see it as one or the other, as you mentioned, I think when we think about how we measure and how we test, certainly cappy is that, again, full funnel approach of being able to have real time optimization, which something that data clean rooms cannot currently provide for.

And so for anyone who is curious about data clean rooms, wanting to get more information, certainly have ton of sources on our site, as I'm sure, the folks up here have as well. But I think, you know, my best advice is if you're starting this process is to set up redundancy, signal. I think there's an opportunity to understand how your metrics will look coming out of a data clean room aggregation and what you already expect with your conversions API setup and really understanding what that discrepancy can look like, what specific metrics and data volume you're getting from each of those setups before making an informed decision on how to move forward.

Certainly, you know, data clean room offers sort of the gold standard in terms of that privacy sensitivity, but It also represents quite a bit of work, both from a dev resourcing standpoint and potentially cost prohibitive for some of our marketers. So something to be cognizant of is you're having these conversations internally.

Thank you. Katie, anything to do that there, generally? Yeah.

I mean, I would just say to, like, a group, everything you said Rachel, and I think we have a couple of sophisticated advertisers that are very intentionally using both solutions. And so if you think about, like, a retail partner who really wants to be able to, in real time, onboard all of the online and offline conversion data and, and average bat average basket size, and and all of that. That is the cappy solution. It's foundational. It gives the highest fidelity, and there's, like, real time optimization, audience builds being built in the ads man manager platform.

But they don't wanna share every piece of data. There's some data that's more private or is just more sensitive. And so for those more corner cases, they're intentionally leveraging the clean room integration to get more creative, be more, dynamic. And so I think just to clear.

It's not like a hypothetical. We have, very thoughtful and innovative partners that are intentionally using both solutions and finding that together, they're really powerful. So I thought you said it really well, but just wanted to share. There's some no one publicly I can share, unfortunately, or wish I could, but, really clear examples of people finding value in both solutions.

And, Jenlyn, I based on all this discussion, how would you qualify whether an advertiser is a good fit for your events API? Like what makes an advertiser say, yes, I check all the boxes I should use. Or is it is it all advertisers?

Honestly, I think it's, it's applicable to all hypertizers, right? I like here a bread and butter. I'm going to start using that.

Going forward.

An armored car, a ten minute.

Okay.

Tension. So there you go. As far as a elevator pitch, it works. So I'm gonna start taking that.

But if you think about this way, like, I go back to the the store, the cookie story, right? Like, this is going forward, at least with platforms like TikTok and, you know, I don't wanna speak any of you guys, perhaps, similar to, snap and Pinterest here. Like, it should be pretty foundational in how you execute digital advertising on with a platform like us. Alright.

So it does apply to everybody.

The our API, certainly, is customizable. So if there's kind of sensitivities on what you send and things like that, you have the ability to kind of, fine tune that. And again, that's at, under the advertisers' control. Right?

The use cases once you set it up, and there is a, still a, a cost or a resource, constraint at the moment, and we'll all keep trying to drive that down. But once it is set up, it's it's there. And it's, it's reliable. So I think the, I think it's, it's not if, a given advertiser should, adapt a API solution.

I think it's, how, when, how fast, and those are the kind of calculations that we're all happy to help you think through.

I think one that I because I so I work on the CPG side of our business, and I get a lot of brands that don't see, like, like, well, I'm not focused on the lower funnel. I'm not looking at, like, the last mile conversion. But I think we forget about, like, how many audiences are built off of, media exposures, and are we gonna lose visibility or, breadth of ability to drive audience build. So we're I think we feel lucky on Pinterest.

We have a lot of first party signals, like a lot of because of the user intent on our platform, we have search behavior a lot of first party signals around what the user is looking to do. And over half of our users actually come to shop on Pinterest. So that intent is really valuable. But at the same time, I think, to to Chen Lynn's your point, it's not a matter of if you're ever gonna need it.

It's like we need to make sure that that foundation to not lose visibility in things like audience sizes. And we already see it. Right? When we look at a post mortem, we say, here's how much you saw two years ago, and here's how many audience members you could have added.

And now it's reduced in half. And so I think we you need to not think just about the conversion and to your point using events. It's also, audience build that's a really important happy use case.

Yeah. If I can just add one thing too, and I think this is something that we can probably all agree on, I think there's fundamentally, like, why Cathy is valuable certainly, you know, there's higher priority parameters. As, you know, Chenlin mentioned, everything is very customizable, as it is with Snap copy as well. There's certain parameters that are not applicable to your business or ones that you are potentially more sensitive to, certainly a conversation to be had.

But at the end of the day, just the basis of setting up a cappy integration is not going to be the silver bullet to you surviving a cookie less future. I think the biggest piece of advice that we talk about internally and certainly share with our advertisers at Snap is that the quality of that signal is really what's going to be the buoy between where we're at today in terms of audience sizes, audience matching, under what it means to truly be cookieless.

Obviously, it's been a journey over the last two years of, you know, losing various platforms, third party cookies. One piece still remains but, you know, as we move towards June or whenever Google decides to really shut the lights on us, I think there's certainly opportunities for you to understand the quality of the signals that you're sending, because that's gonna be the make or break in terms of how you're thinking about what Capi is actually filling a void for, and really how it's allowing you continue to have a stable run business, continue to see the performance that you expect to see on your ad platforms, and then really understanding how it's impacting your measurement solutions.

I mean, I think Jenlyn had illustrated really well earlier that we're moving towards a higher quality signal ecosystem because the one we're moving from never was built for in in the first place.

So that was a really clear articulation of that.

As we wrap up here, is there anything else that you each think that advertisers or other partners in the room should know about your events APIs and how to prepare for for signal loss. I'll start with you, Katie.

Let's see. I didn't have a final thought. I mean, I would say just going back to the idea of, like, Cappy and our API solutions and clean room solutions.

I do think there are, you know, if if you've already got Cappy enabled, like kudos and great, and I think clean room opportunities are the next frontier, right, to get more be bold, be transformative, get creative. And so, I just wanted to share those of you didn't join, we had an earlier session where Pinterest shared, a case study where, we've been working with Albertsons to do kind of custom clean room integrations with their sales data, and we, you know, Mondelez Trisket ran a campaign and was able to use that clean room integration with Albertsons to demonstrate sixteen percent incremental lift in sales. And so I just wanted to share, I think, We believe all here that, like, the Cappy integration is foundational. And but with clean room opportunities, if you get more innovative and exciting, there's kind of a flywheel opportunity. So I just thought I'd share that in case people didn't hear that example shared earlier this week.

But that's what I'll let you guys share your parting words.

I'll I'll basically hone in on two two two phrases, like modernize and future proof. Right? The the, I mean, we are we're all staring at the browser policies and everything like that, it's gonna happen at some point in time. And so might as well just get ahead of it. You know, it's you get at some point, this is how I what I believe in the TikTok believes, this is how digital ads will be transacted.

With a platform like us. And, might might as well just, get get to work. You know, it's I view it very much as a process exercise, not a a decision on whether it's the right integration or not.

Yeah. I think just to echo, you know, both of their points, I think there's very clear stats and proof points that all of us can point to in of advertisers who have seen success in terms of attributable per attributable purchases, increases in what their app installs look like, just understanding more fundamentally, the true value each ad platform is bringing to their business.

Again, the the signal quality piece is really the part that I wanna if you leave with anything, thinking about how your quality of signal really does impact the quality of your Kathy integration.

You know, a ton exciting stuff happening with LiveRamp over the next couple weeks.

You know, we're really excited about the opportunity to be partnering together, in addition to other third party partners. I think the onus is on the platforms to be sharing, you know, thought leadership and guidance around how to navigate the changing times that we continue to be in. So please continue to reach out to your account teams, your, service providers and ensuring that as much that can be taken off of your plates when it comes to the dev resources prioritization, has done so and really the most turnkey and streamlined way possible.

But, yeah, we are, super stoked on where things are trending with Kathy and certainly excited to be working with LiveRamp on it.

Yeah. We we are as well. And thank you to you three for joining and partnering with us. Thank you to everyone in the audience for joining, to Rachel's point.

We wanna help you all make this transition. So if there are any questions about how to connect to these platforms through LiveRAM, or otherwise. We have Jesse Cozart and Ben Cochran, who will be on this side of the room if you're an advertiser asking, how can I connect to many Cabbies, with only one deployment, they'd love to, answer your questions? So appreciate you all joining.

And, enjoy the rest of the conference.

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