FAQ

How far back does Scope3’s data go?

We released a new version of our methodology on January 1, 2023 that is incompatible with prior data. Requests for 2022 data will use the January 2023 emissions model.

Are there limits to the number or frequency of API calls that can be made?

There are no hard limits in place and the API was designed with scale in mind. With that said, it is not designed to be a real-time system. We envision clients wanting to batch data at a deal/campaign level by day or month.

What is rate limiting policy?

The Scope3 API does not have a strict rate-limiting policy; instead, the API infrastructure will scale to meet the demand. The API may return a "429 Too Many Requests" HTTP response code during high load. If your application receives a 429 response, it should retry the request after a small delay.

How many rows can I send in a single request?

For best performance, we suggest sending 4,000 to 8,000 rows per request. The API will accept and process more than this, but your overall throughput will be higher if you split your workload into the suggested batch sizes above.

Should I cache results?

In general, we do not recommend caching. If you are looking for ways to reduce the number of requests, please reach out to Scope3 support for best practices based on your use case.

What countries are supported?

There are four dimensions to how well we support a country:

Do we have emissions intensity data for the electricity grid
Do we have an accurate model of telco and consumer device emissions
Do we have contributed data from key ad tech vendors in the market
Do we model the idiosyncrasies of key publishers in the market

We have good coverage across the above dimensions in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. We have limited electricity grid, telco, and consumer device data in Latin America and Southeast Asia, so our data will be less accurate in those cases. We have not worked directly with publishers outside these regions, so there may be local differences that we are not tracking.

We have real-time grid mix data for 28 countries with region-level data in the US, CA, and AU. For the 200 other supported countries, we use yearly emissions data sourced from the UN Climate Change.

Why can’t Scope3 measure emissions for websites and apps that don’t host an ads.txt or app-ads.txt file?

The ads.txt and app-ads.txt files are the industry standard for publishers to declare which programmatic partners they work with. If a property doesn't have either of these files, we currently mark it as "not measured" because it can mean either that there is no programmatic selling or that the property isn't configured. In the Feb-2023 release we plan to add the ability to mark a property as "no programmatic selling" at which point these sites will show up as measured. Note that some countries, especially Japan, Brazil, and China, do not commonly use ads.txt, and we plan to work directly with publishers in these markets to map their programmatic supply chains.

I was previously able to pull emissions for a domain that is now not returning any data. Why is this happening?

Our goal is continuous improvement of our coverage across channels. However, as things change (either within our model or specific inventory source), there are a few reasons previously "modeled" domains may no longer return data. Please reach out to your Scope3 support contact, so they can investigate and resolve the gap if possible.

How complete is inventory coverage and how is inventory that Scope3 does not yet have coverage accounted for?

Scope3 dataset coverage varies depending on the dimensions (i.e. geo, channel, deviceType, etc.). Our goal is to exceed 95% modeled (impressions modeled / impressions delivered) for the channels in GA. For channels in beta, we aim to exceed 90% modeled. If you have questions or feedback, please reach out.

What is a GMP?

A Green Media Product (GMP) is an inventory package created by publishers or intermediaries for buyers. They can be sold in the form of campaigns or deals/PMPs.