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Search Engines: How You Can Save The World With A Click

January 5, 2017

January resolutions are in full swing and, for anyone who has made themselves a New Year promise to help out the world, there’s a simple digital solution you might not have heard about: Ecosia.

What is Ecosia?

In the organisation’s own words, ‘Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees’. Use Ecosia as a search engine alternative to Google, and you can surf the internet whilst contributing to positively to the environment. Advert revenue generated from the platform helps the team plant trees all over the world – most currently in the desert in Burkina Faso.

The project is dreaming big – with the aim of planting one billion trees by 2020. With over 5 millon trees having been planted as a result of the project so far, and awareness growing rapidly, the team are well on their way to hitting that goal. Users can watch their contribution in real time as the counter clocks up how many trees you’ve helped plant.

So, how does it work?

Ecosia’s search engine is powered by Bing, and runs Bing Ads in their model. 80% of the commission from these Paid Search adverts on its platform is filtered back into the environment, as the project makes use of the income to plant trees.

The business firmly believes in transparency, and as such it publishes monthly business reports, donation receipts and planting partner receipts. You can check out more about their values here.

Adding Ecosia as an extension to your browser means that you can automatically search with Ecosia every day.

Why would you want to advertise on the Search Engine?

Understandably the biggest question on most advertisers minds: what’s to stop people clicking my adverts unnecessarily to drive up revenue for planting trees? Ecosia’s creators are on hand to reassure you though. Algorithms are in place to detect fake clicks and invalidate them, leaving you safe in the knowledge your adverts are only being used by relevant consumers.

How do I advertise?

Paid adverts for Ecosia (known as EcoAds) are run by Bing. To advertise you’ll need to run a Bing Ads account.

Despite a smaller market share, Bing Ads typically run on a much lower cost-per-click than Google’s platform. To find out more about the benefits of Bing, read here.

For more help on Bing advertising, read here.

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