What is a Predictive CAPI?

To grasp the concept of Predictive CAPI (P-CAPI), it’s essential to first understand the foundation: Conversion API (CAPI).

CAPI, short for Conversion API, is a tool developed by Meta and other major platforms (commonly known as "walled gardens") to establish a direct and reliable connection between your marketing data and these platforms. While the term "CAPI" is closely associated with Meta’s Conversion API, the same principle applies to other platforms like TikTok, Google Ads, and more.

What does CAPI do?‍

CAPI allows you to send marketing data—such as website events, app interactions, offline conversions, and messaging events—directly from your server, website platform, app, or CRM to walled gardens. This data is essential for:

• Ad Personalization: Ensuring ads are tailored to individual user preferences.
• Optimization: Improving campaign performance by leveraging real-time insights.
• Measurement: Providing accurate reporting on campaign outcomes.

By bridging your marketing data and advertising platforms, CAPI ensures your ads reach audiences most likely to find them relevant, driving better engagement and conversions.

In the evolving landscape of digital marketing, P-CAPI builds on this foundation by adding advanced capabilities, like predictive insights, that enable even more precise targeting and optimization. Stay tuned for more on how P-CAPI transforms the way brands approach advertising.

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What makes a CAPI predictive?

P-CAPI solutions are designed for efficiently training walled gardens like Meta, TikTok, Google’s ad auction towards specific marketing objectives and outcome. 

For a CAPI to become predictive, it must be powered by a predictive decision engine. This engine enhances CAPI performance by:
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Orchestrating Events

• Evaluating how likely each event is to contribute to the desired marketing outcome.
• Suppressing low-value events while generating synthetic high-value events to improve efficiency.
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Sending Predicted Values

• Providing future-focused data, such as replacing the current purchase value with a 90-day predicted lifetime value (pLTV), to optimize for long-term impact, or appending predictive quality score of leads as value. 
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P-CAPI helps marketers focus on high-impact events and make smarter, data-driven decisions. While most P-CAPI solutions are powered by advanced prediction engines, it is also possible to build one using a rules-based approach.

For example, a rules engine could define a "high-value user" based on specific actions on your site, then use those rules to orchestrate events and predicted values.

However, the more common approach involves leveraging machine learning models. These models are trained on first-party and zero-party data from advertisers and predict key marketing outcomes, such as:

• Whether a visitor will convert
• If a customer will repurchase
• Whether a lead will convert
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P-CAPI systems powered by machine learning provide deeper insights and more accurate predictions, making them the preferred choice for most advertisers.

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How does a P-CAPI benefit marketing initiatives?

P-CAPI sends improved data signals to walled gardens, helping their ad auctions better understand your target audience. This process is often called "training ad auctions" to align with your specific marketing goals.

Since marketing goals can vary across campaigns—such as one campaign focusing on new customer acquisition to lower acquisition costs, while another targets high-value customers to optimize LTV:CAC—it’s common to have multiple P-CAPI implementations within a single ad account. Each implementation operates within its own dedicated dataset, tailored to the specific campaign objective.

For DTC and omni-channel retailers, P-CAPI addresses a wide range of marketing use cases, including:

1. Efficient New Customer Acquisition
   • Reduce new customer acquisition costs (nCAC)
2. Attract High-Value Customers
   • For subscription brands or those with repurchase behavior, focus on high-value customers to optimize LTV:CAC
3. Optimize ROAS 
   • Increase AOV of attributed orders by engaging with prospects and customers who are likely to purchase high ticket point products and services from you
4. Improve Cost Per Order (CPO)
   • Expand beyond ‘in market’ buyers, especially target the “moveable middle” audience to boost conversions, especially useful for scaling in competitive space like beauty, health & wellness, nutrition where competition is fierce for the “in-market” “ buyers attention
5. Better Lead Acquisition
   • Acquire leads with higher conversion potential and optimize cost per converted lead
6. High-Value Signups
   • Target high-quality signups for brands offering free trials or try-before-you-buy options
7. Channel-Specific Customers
   • Acquire customers likely to purchase through specific channels or formats (e.g., in-store)
8. Product or Category Optimization
   • Focus campaigns on specific products or categories to attract prospects most interested in them

P-CAPI helps advertisers tailor their campaigns to achieve specific outcomes, making marketing efforts more precise and effective.

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The Power of P-CAPI with Angler AI

At Angler AI, we specialize in helping brands win the auction training battle. Our P-CAPI solution uses your zero-party and first-party data to train Meta and other walled gardens to deliver better results. Our solution ensures that your in-platform attribution aligns with your model preferences, keeping your data accurate and actionable.

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Attribution might be the grade you receive, but auction training is where the real success lies. 

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Schedule a call with us to learn more about how to get started today.

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