And How We Can Do Better
When you think about carbon emissions, what are the first images that spring to mind? Do you picture aircraft jetting to and from Heathrow? Maybe it’s Industrial processes and factories belching out fumes? Or is it the day-to-day commute and cars stuck in traffic jams pumping out exhaust gases?
These are your stereotypical polluters, but there is in fact a silent contributor that’s so often overlooked: digital marketing.
According to a recent article in The Ecologist, the carbon footprint of digital marketing, and PR, allegedly now exceeds that of the aviation industry. That’s a truly staggering statistic of true, and one that should really give every marketer pause for thought. It’s not just the magazine’s angle though, it’s based upon data from the World Economic Forum (WEF).
While the energy demands of cryptocurrency mining and the huge rise of generative AI have drawn attention to the significant power consumption of data centers, the often-overlooked carbon footprint of digital marketing also now warrants our serious consideration.
Why Digital Marketing Leaves a Mark
Every impression, click, and view in the digital world is powered by vast networks of servers, data centers, and devices. These require enormous amounts of electricity-often generated from non-renewable sources. While digital marketing might seem “cleaner” than print or physical advertising, its impact is largely invisible but no less real.
The WEF has branded single-use data that is placed in the cloud and never used again as “dark data”, a term I’d not heard of before. Automated reports from Google Ads for instance, are generated, stored, and PPC managers are notified. Old email lists need to be audited and removed (It’s your duty as a data manager under your GDPR obligations), unused landing pages, as well as historical analytics data. I for one have been guilty of storing vast amounts of this unseen and unused data, purely for reference purposes.
The Ethical Imperative for Digital Marketing
Recognising the environmental impact of our online activities, the article in The Ecologist highlights the urgent need now for the digital marketing profession to share in their responsibility. measure, report, and actively reduce their digital carbon footprint – a principle that resonates with my own long-held ethical marketing practices.
Practical Steps Toward Greener Marketing
So what should people in the SEO and PPC communities do? And what about the social media section of our digital enclave? It’s all well and good highlighting issues, but as an activist myself, I like practical solutions.
Choose Green Hosting
The first port of call in the whole chain is to host your digital assets with providers powered by renewable energy.
I’ve seen a lot of web hosts boast that they’re green, carbon-neutral, or energy-efficient, but a great place to start is the Green Web Foundation’s directory. I’ve linked directly to the UK vendors here, feel free to search by your country if it differs.
As previously mentioned, I once sought out geothermal powered servers in Iceland, but green hosting is available in the UK now, either matched by carbon offsets or supplied by 100% renewable energy. This has been made possible in my years of search by an increase in home-grown renewable energy from wind and solar. Look for a green web host that has Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs).
By choosing a truly transparent and genuinely climate-friendly web hosting service you’ll be doing your bit to reduce CO2.
Optimise for Efficiency
We should all streamline our websites to use less data and load faster. As a technical SEO specialist, that’s second nature to me. Reducing the Document Object Model (DOM) alone uses less features and code, so that’s a good starting point. You can check this in Google Lighthouse.
I have one website that is pure text and zero images – as an experiment it actually achieved 100% in ALL the Lighthouse scores and I’d never seen that before until I ran this little test in the spirit of the now defunct under5k.org
However, the biggest issue with the DOM is that whilst you can reduce it, as I did when I optimised a mega menu for SEO (See my case study), it’s best that the DOM is analysed at the design and build stage. Signing off a less complex design that requires less in terms of development coding is better than having to retroactively strip back a design. So bake efficiency into your design and dev stages.
Another practical but much quicker fix is fixing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). How often have you seen a 2Mb PNG header where a compressed and correctly dimensioned 250k JPG will suffice? Have you converted your images to the space-saving WebP format? Using simple tools such as resizing in native photo editors with their compressions options will help you achieve more accurate dimensions and smaller file sizes.
And what about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that contain extensive styles for websites these days? JavaScript (JS) too. CSS & JS can both be served more efficiently, thus freeing up server resources, so make sure you minify these resources using server settings or even WordPress plugins (Other CMS are available).
Finally, there’s the option to deliver your website via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). These are “edge servers” that are geolocated closer to your clients, particularly useful for websites with a national and global reach. Wherever you are in the world, this website is delivered via Cloudflare – Brotli compression and other clever algorithms compress and deliver this content from an end-point that’s closer to you than my server is, thus freeing up source machine resources.
It’s the optimiser‘s mindset that is so perfectly suited to this situation, so technical SEO experts are really well suited to making efficiency gains here.
Quality Over Quantity
The first two steps have been more on the technical level, but with your digital marketing itself you should focus on meaningful, targeted campaigns rather than mass messaging.
By this I mean reducing your reach for those campaigns where you make marginal wins but they’re run as “a numbers game”, knowing that the wider you cast your net, the more you bring in. This is where the truly clever marketing is conducted – data-led and data-informed marketing means that you can narrow your focus and still be just as if not more successful.
Broad reach is sometimes necessary, particularly for brand awareness. The art here is to be strategic and informed by your data.
Quality over quantity has always been a mainstay of my SEO strategies, no matter how big or small your digital marketing project. Where some SEOs aim to simply increase traffic, I prefer to improve relevance.
For example; I once worked at a digital marketing agency in Woking and wrote a “filler” article in their digital marketing blog about the famous local author HG Wells. Whilst I got regular top ten ranking and traffic, it wasn’t adding to any campaigns’ bottom line.
Instead be laser-focused on the digital marketing campaigns that get the best Click Through Rates (CTR), have the longest dwell times, lowest bounce rates, and highest conversion metrics. Measure what matters and leverage your best assets.
At this point I will also add that you should conduct regular house-keeping in your digital asset management – clear up and delete those old auto-generated Google Sheets, and back up the most valuable historical data to secure local external hard drives. You’ll be reducing the burden of “dark data” on data centres and reducing their load.
Educate and Advocate
Now that you’re in the optimisation mindset for energy-reduction, it’s your duty to Inform clients and audiences about the hidden costs of digital marketing and champion the sustainable practices.
How do we educate our clients? Do we include carbon footprint considerations in our reporting? Should we advocate for more sustainable practices within our teams and organisations? I think yes to all these ideas.
By sharing your knowledge of climate-friendly technical approaches and intelligent marketing strategies, you will not only be influencing your own customers but accelerating the concepts to a broader world.
A Call to Action
Digital marketing offers incredible opportunities, but it also comes with these unseen costs. By embracing transparency, innovation, and responsibility, we can ensure that our marketing efforts don’t come at the planet’s expense. Audit our digital marketing activities and explore the Green Web Directory. Let’s build a greener, more ethical digital future..
If you need help with green auditing I can assist with website and SEO audits, assess your digital marketing footprint and advise on best practice, plus take the steps you need through technical SEO and we can maintain this good work through an SEO retainer. Call me on 01252 692 765 to secure my services.