As companies try to cut down on their carbon footprint, optimizing their digital marketing is a surprising way to help them do both. It can also help them make more money, so everyone wins.
How much clicks cost in carbon?
Fifty-five released a study (required registration) in 2022 that found the average media campaign releases 70 tons of CO2, which is the same amount of carbon dioxide as seven people produce in a year. Businesses may have to pay a lot to cut down on carbon pollution, but they can’t do nothing. So, it’s a balance act between making money and being sustainable.
The study broke down the parts of a digital marketing strategy and figured out how much CO2 each one would produce in different situations. By connecting these results to good business results, marketers can show that they can increase ROI while also reducing carbon emissions over time.
A new study from the ANA says that almost two-thirds of the money spent on programmatic advertising was wasted because ads were shown to the wrong people. Also, a lot of ads end up on sites that are only for ads, which are usually scams, clickbait, or sites with low-value merchandise. This is also the list of places with the largest carbon footprints. A huge amount of work, money, and power are wasted as a result. So, adjusting campaigns based on how well they work not only raises ROI, but it also lowers the carbon impact of businesses.
Bringing business and environmental goals together.
Advertisers need to figure out which parts of their business cause the biggest carbon footprint and focus on a few specific goals at a time to help lower this total impact.
The first step is to make goals that you can reach. It’s still new to most people how to figure out how to measure the carbon footprint of digital efforts. Luckily, there are more tools and more study being done on how to report carbon footprints. The Bilan Carbone method is one way for a digital company to find out what their digital tracks are. One way to show that smaller carbon impacts can be good for business is to do this.
The second step is for businesses to come up with a plan to improve their digital marketing and cut down on carbon emissions. Better outputs will come from your smart insights and measures, and your overall carbon footprint will go down. Here are three important things to think about when making a plan that makes sense.
1. Audience targeting.
The Shift Project says that digital actions are responsible for 4% of the world’s carbon footprint and that energy use is rising by 9% every year. Because of how important online activities are becoming, it’s clear that focusing on the right audience is essential for any effort to succeed, both in terms of making money and caring for the environment. The first step that makes sense is to:
- Check to see how often your audience sees your action.
- Find out when the person stops being interested.
You can look at very specific data in a data clean room to see how people behaved across different campaigns and find the best frequency cap. This can make sure that a campaign is seen at fewer, but more effective times, which means that your ads will be shown less often on devices.
The clean room also lets you check to see if the people who see your ads act the way you want them to. You might find that the efforts that are most effective at getting conversions could be improved or even slashed to make them more effective. This is good for business and better for the world because it cuts down on the damage that processing data, using servers, and sending digital ads does.
2. How well clever ads work.
Analyzing and improving creative tools to get better results is one of the most important parts of making a campaign. But it takes a lot of time to look through hundreds of different creatives by hand to see what works and what doesn’t.
To do this on a large scale, you might want to use a unified creative analytics suite with AI and machine learning tools. Knowing exactly what works best with customers cuts down on both the number of creatives that are shown and the number that are needed. This lowers your carbon footprint before and after the campaign goes live.
But use AI as little as possible—its usefulness comes at a huge cost to the world. A new study from the International Energy Agency says that in 2022, data centers used 460 terawatt-hours, which is 2% of all the electricity used in the world. This was mostly due to data centers and cooling systems for data centers. By 2026, AI and crypto mining are projected to make that amount of use double.
3. Real-time bid optimization.
Value-based bids, or VBB, is a good way to cut down on your carbon footprint. It tells you how much an impression is worth before you bid on any goods. You can use VBB and machine learning models together to make strong and flexible buying strategies. To do this, you’ll need to set clear goals for success and use the right attribution model to give credit to each touchpoint.
These are some parts of the digital advertising business that make a big difference in how much carbon dioxide companies release into the air. If a business did better in these areas, it would leave a much smaller carbon impact.
