Unlocking efficiency: Decarbonizing Media on the Google Marketing Platform

The digital advertising industry’s carbon footprint is significant. As the industry continues to evolve, so does its environmental impact. According to research from Sharethrough, one million ad impressions can generate emissions equivalent to a round-trip flight from London to Boston or the energy required to charge over 121,000 smartphones. These figures underscore the urgent need to address emissions at every stage of campaign planning and execution.

Introduction

A key concern in the advertising industry is the belief that improving sustainability requires sacrificing quality and granularity. However, this is not the case. In today’s market, there are numerous innovative solutions that enhance media quality while simultaneously reducing the carbon emissions of advertising efforts. This blog outlines actionable strategies for advertisers to reduce the environmental impact of digital campaigns while improving overall effectiveness.

1. Re-Evaluate Media Partners and Supply Paths

Aligning with media partners that prioritize sustainability is a key step. A growing number of programmatic ad vendors are offering curated Sustainable Private Marketplace deals (PMPs) within DSPs like DV360. These Programmatic deals enable advertisers to work exclusively with low-carbon publishers across relevant verticals while cutting out Made-for-advertising (MFA) and high-emission sites. 

These PMPs not only focus on reducing emissions but oftentimes also use tracking pixels to calculate the Scope 3 emissions of Sustainable PMP-ran campaigns and invest in offset initiatives such as carbon capture and reforestation.

Refining the supply path is another crucial factor. The programmatic advertising supply chain involves multiple intermediaries like ad exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, and data providers. Each stage in this complex chain requires significant computational power and energy consumption, leading to a substantial environmental impact. 

By optimizing supply chains to minimize unnecessary intermediaries and exclude non-quality sources like MFA sites with high ad-density, advertisers can reduce emissions and improve media efficiency. A transparent and efficient supply chain leads to higher-quality impressions and cost-effective media buying.

2. Optimize Targeting to Reduce Ad Wastage

In both programmatic and search advertising, precision is key to reducing ad waste. In search, advertisers should refine keywords, apply negative keywords to exclude irrelevant terms, and focus on high-performing regions and demographics. Similarly, programmatic campaigns should use advanced audience targeting options, including lookalike modeling and affinity groups, to deliver relevant ads. A key consideration for advertisers should be to maximise ad quality while maintaining cost-effective reach. With effective targeting solutions, there shouldn’t be a tradeoff between quality and quantity.

Additionally, advertisers can align contextual targeting in DV360 with keyword-driven search strategies. For example, programmatic ads placed on content-rich pages can complement search ads targeting the same user intent, creating a cohesive and efficient cross-channel experience.

• Smarter Automation for Sustainability: Automation tools across channels offer significant opportunities to improve efficiency and relevance. In search, solutions like smart bidding, dynamic search ads, and campaign scheduling help ensure ads are served at the right time, to the right audience, in the right context. These tools can align seamlessly with DV360’s AI-powered bidding strategies, such as CPA and ROAS bidding, to optimize campaigns toward shared KPIs like conversions or revenue. By centralizing these automation strategies, advertisers can create a unified approach that maximizes ROI while minimizing ad impressions that don’t deliver value.

• Focus on High-Quality Placements: Programmatic advertisers can reduce waste by prioritizing premium and high quality inventory and placements using metrics like qCPM (quality cost-per-thousand) and qCPC (quality cost-per-click). Similarly, search advertisers should focus budgets on high-performing keywords and campaigns that drive the most conversions. By consolidating low-performing placements and keywords across both channels, brands can focus on what works while avoiding unnecessary resource expenditure.

• Data-Driven Optimization: Data is the foundation of sustainable ad strategies. Advertisers should implement cross-channel attribution models to understand how programmatic and search campaigns contribute to conversions and reduce redundancy. Unified reporting dashboards can provide insights into the performance of shared audiences, overlapping placements, and cross-channel bidding strategies, enabling more informed decisions. Moreover, sustainability metrics such as carbon emissions per impression, click, or conversion can help advertisers measure the environmental impact of their campaigns and align with sustainability goals.

By aligning targeting, automation, and optimization strategies across programmatic and search channels, advertisers can create highly efficient campaigns that deliver results while reducing waste. A unified approach minimizes redundancies, enhances audience engagement, and supports sustainability goals, benefiting both advertisers and the environment. The result is smarter, greener advertising that balances performance with purpose.

3. Adopt Carbon-Friendly Formats and Tracking Tools

Emerging ad formats and technologies offer opportunities to lower emissions while enhancing campaign performance. For instance:

• Adaptive Bitrate Streaming: Some programmatic ad tech companies offer streaming solutions that adjust video and image ad quality based on users’ internet speed, reducing energy consumption and improving ad load times.
• Engagement-Based Formats: Innovative ad platforms enable user-driven ad actions, like watching an ad to completion or interacting with ad elements,  which can trigger positive impacts such as charitable donations or allocate a portion of media spend to offset carbon emissions. Others offer interactive display and video ad enhancements that promote user engagement and improve the overall quality of ad impressions.

Independent measurement providers now offer tools that allow advertisers to monitor and manage emissions effectively. These measurement tools can be integrated into Programmatic DSPs such as DV360 via third-party integrations or through direct collaboration. This simplifies carbon tracking and supports emission-reducing campaign planning. Advertisers can use these tools to make informed strategic decisions, filter out media partners that do not meet their sustainability goals, and optimize towards low-emission formats and environments.

4. Cutting website emissions

Websites play a crucial role in energy efficiency. Reducing page load times through optimized media, images and tags can significantly lower energy consumption. Slow websites require more server resources to handle requests. Undertaking some simple measures to reduce page weights can drastically reduce energy consumption while also improving user experience and engagement.

Sustainable design principles, such as avoiding auto-play features and prioritizing lightweight content, contribute to a greener digital ecosystem while delivering better outcomes for advertisers.

It may surprise many that the brightness and colour selections are a significant factor when it comes to carbon emissions on your site. Simple changes such as offering an opt-in ‘Dark mode’ for users browsing the site can dramatically reduce site emissions while boosting site performance through faster load-times.

Our Experience Optimization team can identify and address performance bottlenecks, such as slow page loads, front-end errors, and inefficient resource usage. By optimizing your website’s performance, we can:

• Enhance user experience: Faster load times and fewer errors lead to higher user satisfaction and engagement.
• Reduce environmental impact: A more efficient website consumes less energy, reducing your carbon footprint.

5. Sustainable Ad trafficking practices

By optimizing ad trafficking and creative management within CM360, Advertisers can effectively contribute to sustainable efforts while ensuring their ads are delivered effectively.

• Streamlined creative rotation: Setting accurate creative rotation settings within CM360 for third-party placements and direct buys can ensure only the most relevant ads are served, reducing the volume of low quality impressions and consequently energy wastage.
• Tag management: Consolidating site tagging set up and reducing the amount of inactive and redundant tags can significantly reduce site’s data consumption. Advertisers should look to simplify their tracking set up on CM360 and Google Analytics to ensure only necessary data points are collected.
• Using lightweight creative assets: Large creative file sizes significantly increase the energy consumption associated with ad hosting and delivery. Using smaller or compressed files in your ad-serving platform can substantially reduce carbon emissions while maintaining ad quality and performance, ensuring both environmental sustainability and effective audience engagement.

Conclusion: Sustainability as the New Standard

The path to lower-emission digital advertising requires collaboration across teams, partners, and clients. From choosing eco-friendly media partners to optimizing websites, small steps collectively lead to significant impact. As the industry evolves, sustainability must transition from an option to a standard, ensuring campaigns are effective and environmentally responsible.