Publishers are seeking ways to take steps towards sustainability through all of their platforms. One area that is increasingly becoming a focus is digital advertising and ad serving.
Advertisers are seeking out digital platforms that are aligned with their sustainability values. We also work directly with programmatic advertisers to help them better measure and manage their carbon emissions via Carbon Footprint for Google Ads.
We recognize that revenue conservation is a top priority and we have a set of industry best practices that can maximize inventory and yield while promoting eco-friendly practices. These recommendations should be validated within your network to assess value and impact.
Best practices
Jump to a section below:
- Enhancing user experience for efficiency and lower emissions
- Minimizing wasteful ad impressions and their carbon impact
- Refining your ad tech stack and data strategy for sustainability
- Lowering the carbon footprint of ad creatives
Enhancing user experience for efficiency and lower emissions
A smooth, fast user experience not only keeps your audience engaged, but also directly reduces energy consumption per visit. Lighter, quicker pages mean less processing power and data transfer, contributing to a smaller carbon footprint.
Boost page speed
Use tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights to assess your site's performance. Implement the suggestions provided to make your website load faster, which in turn reduces energy use for each visitor.
Monitor core web vitals
Regularly check the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console. Improving these metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift) leads to a better user experience and often correlates with reduced resource consumption.
Offer dark mode for OLED devices
While LCD screens don't benefit much, offering a dark mode for your website or app can lead to significant energy savings for users with OLED screens (common in many newer smartphones). This provides a user choice that can also be an energy-saving one.
Minimizing wasteful ad impressions and their carbon impact
Every ad impression that goes unseen or is served due to inefficient processes contributes to unnecessary energy consumption.
Optimize ad delivery with ads.txt and sellers.json
Regularly review your ads.txt (and app-ads.txt) file to ensure it only authorizes legitimate and high-value sellers. Analyze each authorized partner's revenue contribution against their ad calls. Conduct A/B tests to streamline your ad supply chain, reduce redundant ad calls, and save processing energy.
Buyers that are optimizing towards a more transparent, direct supply chain use the sellers.json file to identify direct inventory versus reseller inventory. Ensure your seller information is transparent and publicly available by allowing your information to be listed in the sellers.json file to best help ad buyers verify your inventory. Learn how to Provide seller information with sellers.json.
Limit multi-hop resellers
Every time an ad impression passes through multiple intermediaries (ad exchanges, SSPs, DSPs, ad networks, resellers) before being served, it consumes energy due to numerous server calls, data processing, and computational power at each step. By working to streamline your digital ad supply chain and favoring more direct paths, you can:
- Decrease the overall energy footprint of your ad operations.
- Support sustainability goals through more efficient, less resource-intensive advertising.
Maximize ad viewability
Use viewability reports (such as in Google Ad Manager) to understand which ad placements perform best. Optimize your page layouts to ensure ads are genuinely viewable, creating more impact for advertisers and reducing energy spent on unseen impressions. Learn more about viewability best practices.
Implement lazy loading for ads and content
Lazy loading is a technique where ads and content only load when they are about to enter the user's screen. This significantly speeds up initial page load times, reduces overall data downloaded, and conserves resources by not loading unseen ads. By ensuring ads are only requested and rendered as needed, you also improve viewability and reduce wasted energy.
Reduce bot traffic and unnecessary crawling
A significant portion of internet traffic is non-human (bots, crawlers). While some are essential (like search engine crawlers), excessive or unwanted bot activity consumes server resources and energy.
- robots.txt: Use your
robots.txtfile to instruct search engine bots to avoid crawling or indexing non-essential pages or to crawl your site less frequently. - Site optimization: Block known malicious bots and regularly clean up your site by removing unnecessary links, tags, and metadata that might attract excessive crawling.
Refining your ad tech stack and data strategy for sustainability
An untargeted or redundant ad tech setup and data strategy can lead to significant processing overhead. Streamlining these elements can drastically reduce energy consumption within your ad operations and promote eco-conscious advertising.
Use pod bidding (video only)
Pod Bidding allows the entire ad pod (all requests within an ad unit) to be traded within a single auction, rather than individual video requests. Auctioning the entire pod reduces data traffic and computational overhead, which reduces energy consumption and speeds up the auction.
Renegotiate low-performing deals
Some "always on deals" with agencies look at every single impression but hardly bid on any, creating lots of waste. Raise awareness with your agency that there is a poor bidding ratio, and then suggest to re-negotiate the deal (for example, change the floor price, remove some parameters, and so on).
Lowering the carbon footprint of ad creatives
The design and delivery of ad creatives play a significant role in overall energy consumption. Heavy or unoptimized creatives require more data and processing power, increasing their carbon footprint.
Compress and minimize code (CSS, JavaScript, HTML)
Many web page elements, including those related to ad display, can be significantly reduced in size. Utilize tools (such as HTMLMinifier, CSS modular minifier, CSSO, UglifyJS, Google Closure Compiler, AMP) to minify your site's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Smaller file sizes mean faster loading and less energy consumed during transfer and rendering.
Use efficient image formats
Adopt modern image formats like WebP. WebP images are typically around 30% smaller than JPEGs or PNGs of equivalent visual quality. This significantly reduces data transfer and speeds up ad loading, directly contributing to energy savings. Ensure you have fallbacks for older browsers if necessary.
