Measuring the sustainability of digital marketing campaigns – an impossible task?

Sustainability is quickly becoming a critical concern for all businesses, especially in our industrial specialist sector. More than ever, customers are making buying decisions based on a company’s sustainability credentials, in some cases even opting to spend more on a product they know is sustainably produced.

As a sector, marketing is not exempt from this change. Traditional marketing campaigns had an easier time of evaluating sustainability as there were tangible activities that could be directly measured like paper waste or transport emissions. Measuring the sustainability of digital marketing campaigns presents a new challenge for marketers.

Measuring the un-measurable
Digital marketing’s impact on sustainability is indirect and difficult to quantify. Any marketer looking to get an accurate analysis of a campaign must include energy consumption from data centres, electronic waste from devices, and the overall carbon footprint of their office including internet usage. The data on the environmental impact of digital activities is not always readily available, forcing marketers to take on the analysis task themselves to begin setting their position as a sustainability leader. Any assessment must also take into account the environmental impact of third-party services that are included within a campaign, and marketers must find out if they have matching sustainability approaches. Each entity in the complex supply chain of a digital marketing campaign requires evaluation for a true representation of environmental impact.

Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted framework or standardised set of metrics for measuring the sustainability of digital marketing campaigns, creating a challenge for marketers to compare and benchmark performances.

Taking sustainable action
Despite these challenges, there are a number of metrics marketers can review to accurately measure the sustainability of a campaign:

1. Energy consumption – probably the most obvious metric for review, marketers should assess their own device usage alongside any further computing needs a company might have. This will show the energy usage directly from the marketer’s business for setting up a campaign as well as surrounding technology like offsite data centres.
2. Carbon footprint – everything included within a digital campaign will have an effect on the carbon footprint of a campaign. Even seemingly unrelated activities like web hosting can have a major impact on overall sustainability.
3. Resource efficiency – this very broad term covers everything from device lifecycle to internal travel plans, again all will impact the overall sustainability of a digital marketing campaign.

With the metrics set, marketers can turn to actions to ensure digital campaigns are completed as sustainably as possible.

1. Choosing sustainable partners – a digital campaign requires input from multiple stakeholders, the first action is to review the sustainability policy of all involved to ensure they have matching sustainability practices.
2. Optimisation of assets – this action is slightly more difficult to implement until the desired client outcome is set. Efficient websites or light digital content can actually reduce the required data transfer leading to an overall reduction in energy consumption.
3. Monitoring usage – implementing best practices such as reducing video autoplay, optimising image sizes, and opting for static content where possible will all feed a digital campaign’s ability to be sustainable.

We spoke to Jonathan Barrett, Founder and Editor of Sustainable Engineering Magazine, about how his team created a website with only 0.07g of carbon emissions per page view and continue to pledge commitment to sustainable marketing.

Jonathan told us: “Sustainability in digital marketing might be in its infancy, but new tools are being released, academia is on the case, experts are emerging, and groups are forming.

“As Scope 3 emissions come under the spotlight, driven by legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), marketing departments will eventually be asked two simple questions: what is the carbon footprint of this department’s activities; and what is the roadmap for reducing it? Ouch. My suggestion is to start asking suppliers of marketing tools and services these same questions starting now.

“Tools I suggest starting with include websitecarbon.com and the Green Software Foundation. We used the websitecarbon.com algorithm to measure the green coding efforts for our own website, which resulted in a world class 0.07g from data centre to user per page view. I think green coding really requires a clean sheet of paper, potentially undermining incumbent developers’ investments in legacy code. This opens the door to disruptive startups, such as Sustainable Engineering, so keep any eye out for newcomers.”

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving sustainability as part of a digital marketing campaign, in fact the sustainability of digital-only activities is hardly recorded and presented in the sector. There is misconception that if the campaign is digital there are no physical implications for sustainability but that just isn’t the case. Marketers have the opportunity to differentiate themselves in the sector by producing sustainably-conscious digital marketing campaigns.