Billy Loizou: Conversion APIs – Unlocking Better Performance for Travel and Airline Campaigns

Guest post – Billy Loizou (above), APAC Area Vice President, Amperity

 

The Australian travel and tourism industry, which this year is expected to contribute $314.4 billion to local GDP and support 1.7 million jobs, is experiencing massive growth with strong demand from both domestic and international travellers. With so much at stake, competition for travellers’ attention is fierce and advertising efficiency has never mattered more.

In this competitive and high-value market, hotel marketers are focused on maximising the return on every advertising dollar to maintain their competitive edge. The merit of maximising reach and value in marketing could be significant, as it will also put operators in a greater position to pass value onto consumers struggling amid high prices and a cost-of-living crisis.

But the breakdown of traditional digital tracking systems is limiting the ability of travel and airline leaders to see what’s really working. Due to changes in operating systems, privacy regulations including Australia’s Privacy Act amendments, and browser policies, traditional methods like website tracking tools are breaking down.

For travel leaders, this challenge presents a new opportunity to leverage their first-party data. At the center of that opportunity is the next evolution in advertising infrastructure: conversion APIs (or CAPIs).

What are conversion APIs?

A CAPI allows brands to send conversion events (such as a completed booking or loyalty enrollment) directly to an advertising platform like Meta or TikTok. Compared to traditional cookies or ‘pixels’, which track users through a browser, conversion events are captured directly by a brand’s servers.

This approach works around blockers that disrupt browser-based tracking and enables better campaign targeting and attribution. CAPIs allow brands to send richer, more structured data. For example, room types, such as ocean view suites on the Gold Coast, a penthouse in Sydney, or a dorm in Melbourne, or loyalty status. This feeds additional context to ad platform optimisation models.

A better system to tackle today’s fragmented environment

When it comes to digital attribution, the travel industry encounters challenges few other sectors face, as guest conversions span so many channels. Major hotel companies operate across multiple regions, brands, and booking sites – from Sydney’s CBD to Cairns’ reef resort.

With Australians spending 397.5 million nights away on domestic trips in 2024, guest journeys undoubtedly take place across multiple devices, platforms and channels.

For example, a guest may browse hotels on their phone but finalise the booking later via laptop or a phone call. Without a more dynamic data-sharing framework, it’s extremely challenging for brands to connect the dots.

In this fragmented environment, CAPIs provide a way to create a closed-loop measurement system. For example, if a guest books a retreat in Byron Bay after clicking a Facebook ad but finishes checking out through the hotel’s app whilst on the train to work in Melbourne, a CAPI connection can pass that event back to Meta’s systems in real time.

This allows the platform to attribute the conversion and optimise campaign delivery, resulting in higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

Greater return on adspend

Brands that have implemented CAPIs are already seeing meaningful performance gains. On Meta, advertisers using CAPIs often report double-digit improvements in ROAS compared to pixel-only setups.

For Australian travel brands competing for a share of the $212 billion combined international and domestic visitor spend forecast for 2025, better data will help to identify high-value audiences, suppress unqualified traffic and bid more efficiently. Before CAPIs, these brands were also missing out on attributing offline revenue to digital ads, meaning they underestimated advertising’s business value.

The benefits are even more significant when brands share value-based signals, such as booking revenue or room category, through their CAPI setup.

Not all conversions are created equal. A last-minute one-night stay in a Brisbane business hotel is very different from a five-day resort package at a Whitsundays property with spa treatments and diving excursions.

CAPIs enable value-based bidding, so platforms can prioritise ad delivery to users who are more inclined to enjoy a certain kind of experience, and therefore are likely to generate more revenue. For IT leaders, this data-driven approach ensures that advertising investments are directly tied to business results.

Final Takeaways:

With the Right Tech and Some Help from IT, Marketing Success Awaits

Implementing CAPIs requires technical expertise, cross-functional alignment, and a robust data infrastructure – especially without a trusted customer data platform (CDP).

• • Establish secure, scalable data pipelines: Tech teams must help build infrastructure that feeds conversion data from internal systems to media platforms.
• • Enable accurate identity resolution: CAPIs are most effective when platforms can tie conversions to users across channels by combining data from websites, apps, loyalty programs and booking engines to build unified guest profiles. Without this foundation, CAPI signals may not reach their full potential.
• • Ensure strong data governance and privacy compliance: CAPIs support privacy-forward practices by reducing reliance on browser-side identifiers, but IT teams still need to ensure that consent preferences are respected and that data is sent securely.

When these systems are in place, marketing teams can execute faster and with greater confidence, focusing on what generates the most meaningful impact whether targeting international visitors during peak season or domestic travellers during school holidays.