6 Sustainable Ad Strategies for Publishers to Drive Performance with Microsoft Monetize

With the growing emphasis on sustainability, it’s crucial for ad publishers like you to take tangible actions today to reduce the environmental impact of your inventory.

The methods of requesting and rendering ads within your ad placements have a significant influence on the carbon emissions generated by your domain or application.¹ And implementing sustainable best practices can help future-proof your business, meet emissions reporting requirements for your advertiser clients, and ensure that your inventory remains environmentally friendly.

How to Optimize Your Ad Strategies for Sustainability and Performance

A healthier business and positive impact on the environment are a win-win. So, we’ve put together 6 key steps for publishers, so you can set up your inventory to be efficient for both emissions and revenue at the same time.

1. Optimize supply path to avoid ad request duplication

A Supply Side Platform (SSP) is a platform that connects publishers with multiple sources of demand and helps manage inventory across different channels. With the increasing use of Supply Path Optimization (SPO) by Demand Side Platforms (DSP)—platforms that allow advertisers and agencies to buy ad inventory—sending duplicated ad requests to SSPs isn’t the most effective way to optimize yield – for both revenue and for reduced electricity consumption.

Instead, you should focus on enhancing the value of your requests by investing in supply signals, adopting transparent selling practices, building direct relationships with buyers, and leveraging yield analysis tools like Microsoft Yield Analytics. This approach optimizes revenue and promotes a more sustainable and efficient ad delivery system.

2. Set inventory floors

You should always provide bid floors to avoid responding with bids for auctions that you won’t be qualified for or win. This recommended best practice is also in the IAB Tech Lab’s Sustainability Playbook and can be done several ways in Microsoft Monetize.

You can:

• Set a reserve price on your placements.
• Configure yield management floors for your publishers, which will forward non-bid-response-dependent floors to downstream ad tech partners like external bidders.
• Set a bid floor on a deal.
• Send dynamic floors in bid requests via prebid or otherwise.

3. Reconsider pre-fetching

Requesting and rendering ads only when users reach the specific site or app area where those placements are can help lower carbon emissions.

Websites that delay loading non-essential resources improve load speed, reduce bounce rates, and reduce the number of non-viewable ads. This lowers the amount of energy needed to run the site, which can save operations costs. It’s widely considered as a UX best practice and can be accomplished with a single click in most content delivery systems.

When you pre-fetch ads for below-the-fold placements upon user page navigation, page load times can increase. And ads that load prematurely and remain unseen if users don’t scroll down lead to higher emissions. This is especially crucial for video ads, which have higher creative weights that translate into even more emissions.

For times when pre-fetching is necessary, you can consider using lazy loading techniques to enhance site performance. With lazy loading, your ads will only render when they enter view. This optimizes data transfer and energy use and can potentially improve your inventory’s viewability.

4. Send single multi-format requests

If your ad unit supports multiple formats—like display, native, and video—you should send a single multi-format ad request instead of separate requests for each format.

Historically, this approach hasn’t been adopted because current OpenRTB specifications don’t allow for multiple bid floors for different formats. However, the IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Supply Chain Working Group is currently working on a proposal to add this functionality.

5. Optimize your supply chain

Maintaining a healthy and efficient inventory supply chain through programmatic channels can decrease latency and boost transparency and control over your inventory. You can follow best practices across yield, quality, and service to determine whether you should consider an SSP partner as an inventory seller.

• Yield: Different SSPs may charge different fees, offer different levels of support, or have different quality standards. You should evaluate whether an SSP is worth working with based on quality and service considerations.
• Quality: Be sure to check SSP compliance with industry standards and best practices, such as ads.txt, sellers.json. You should consider the quality of ads from an SSP for brand safety, ad fraud, and user experience to avoid any harmful ads that may damage your reputation or user loyalty.
• Service: You want to work with SSPs that provide the best solutions and guidance to optimize your inventory and revenue. You should assess an SSP’s platform and tools for ease of use, flexibility, and functionality… and evaluate their support team for expertise, responsiveness, and proactiveness.

Overall, you want to reduce your number of authorized sellers to create a clearer and more efficient marketplace, cut down on intermediary costs, and give your efforts the best chance at reducing energy demands, making your campaigns more efficient with the hope to reduce environmental emissions impact.²

For example, a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Scope 3 cited advertisers that adopted Green Media Products (GMPs) which are available through Microsoft Advertising, updated their inclusion lists to only target low emitting inventory for their campaigns and optimized media placements to remove any identifiable high emitting publishers by reducing emissions and improving campaign performance. The 6 brands in this study reduced the carbon cost of the campaigns by reduction in carbon by impressions (gCO₂PM) in a range of 3% to 36%.²

To understand the relative impact of GMPs, consider brand 4 from the ANA scope 3 study whereby using these media placements they saw an 16% reduction in gCO₂PM and a reduction in eCPM. They reduced 16% of carbon based on $35k media spend equally 187,000 grams of carbon. Scaling the optimization approach to $1 million in display advertising spend, this created a reduction of over 5 million grams of carbon they achieved.² These 5 million grams of carbon saved on $1M ad campaign is equivalent to taking one car off the road for an entire year or it’s like planting 82 tree seedlings and letting them grow for 10 years.³