As businesses strive to reduce their carbon footprint, digital marketing optimization is an unexpected solution that can also lead to higher ROI, making it a true win-win scenario.
carbon cost of clicks
In 2022, Fifty Five published a study. (Registration required) This shows that the average media campaign generates 70 tonnes of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the carbon footprint of seven people on average. Reducing carbon emissions can have significant costs for businesses, but doing nothing is not an option. Therefore, it is a balancing act between sustainability and profit.
This study broke down the components of a digital marketing campaign and calculated the CO2 equivalents for different scenarios. By aligning these results with favorable business outcomes, marketers can demonstrate that they can increase their ROI while achieving sustainable reductions in carbon emissions.
A recent report from ANA found that nearly two-thirds of the money spent on programmatic advertising was wasted because the ads were shown to the wrong target audience. Additionally, many ads end up on ad-only sites that are typically scams, clickbait, or offer low-value inventory. These places are also the places with the largest carbon footprints. As a result, huge amounts of labor, money, and power are wasted. Therefore, optimizing your campaigns based on performance not only increases your ROI but also reduces your organization's carbon footprint.
Dig deeper: The role of modern marketing in carbon reduction
Aligning business and environmental goals
Advertisers must focus on one specific business objective at a time to identify the areas that contribute most to carbon emissions growth and reduce this overall impact. yeah.
The first step is to set specific goals. Measuring the carbon footprint of digital campaigns is a new thing that people are starting to understand. Fortunately, the number of tools and amount of research for reporting carbon emissions is increasing. The Bilan Carbone method is just one tool available to digital businesses to measure their digital footprint. This is one way to demonstrate how reducing carbon emissions can lead to positive business outcomes.
The second step is to develop a strategy as a company to improve your digital campaigns and reduce your carbon footprint. This turns smart insights and measurements into better outcomes, reducing your overall carbon footprint. Below are three important areas to include when building a coherent strategy.
1. Audience targeting
According to a report by The Shift Project, digital activities account for 4% of global carbon emissions and energy consumption is increasing by 9% every year. Considering the growing impact of online activity, it is clear that optimally targeting the right audience is the key to campaign success, both from a revenue and environmental perspective. The natural first step is:
- Evaluate how often your audience interacts with your activity.
- Determine when users start to lose interest.
Data Clean Room allows you to analyze highly detailed data to understand people's behavior across multiple campaigns and find optimal frequency caps. This allows your campaigns to be displayed more effectively in less time and reduces the frequency with which your device is used to display ads.
A clean room also allows you to see if people exposed to your campaign behave as expected. You'll discover that the campaigns you're optimizing for conversions can be effectively adjusted or cut back to improve efficiency. This benefits your business while reducing the environmental impact of data processing, server usage, and digital ad serving.
Dig deeper: How reducing your carbon footprint can save you money and make your advertising more effective
2. Improving the efficiency of advertising creatives
One of the most important parts of creating a campaign is analyzing and optimizing your creative assets for better performance. However, manually analyzing hundreds of different creatives to determine what's working and what's not is extremely time-consuming.
A great way to do this at scale is with a centralized creative analytics suite that leverages AI and machine learning tools. A solid understanding of what works best for consumers will reduce the total number of creatives served and the number of creatives needed, significantly minimizing your carbon footprint before and after campaign launches.
However, use AI as sparingly as possible. Improving its efficiency comes at a huge environmental cost. Data centers used 460 terawatt-hours, or 2% of all global electricity use, in 2022, with most of that coming from data centers and data center cooling, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. did. AI and crypto mining are expected to double consumption by 2026.
3. Real-time bidding optimization
Value-based bidding (VBB) is an effective way to minimize your carbon footprint. Identify the value of an impression before bidding on inventory. By defining key success metrics and leveraging the right attribution model to allocate credit to each touchpoint, VBB and machine learning models can be effectively combined to deliver a robust and dynamic bidding strategy. Masu.
Dig deeper: How advertisers can take the lead in reducing their carbon footprint
These are examples of areas within the digital advertising industry that contribute significantly to a company's carbon emissions. Improving a company's performance in these areas will significantly reduce its carbon footprint.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
