Online Lifestyle Network Boosts its Advertising Revenue With DataDome

The Problem: Loss of ad revenue due to non-human traffic.

“Our revenue comes from ads: display ads and video ads”, explains Ray Semaan, Head of Technology at Online Lifestyle Network. “For top-level advertisers, one of the most important metrics is human versus non-human traffic. When we charge an advertiser for an impression, they want to know that the ad was actually seen by a human, not by a bot.”

To evaluate the viewability of ads on a given website, many advertisers leverage Moat Analytics as a third-party measurement and analytics platform.

“Moat’s standard is that publishers must have at least 95% human traffic, but to be competitive at our level, we need a 99% score,” Ray elaborates. “In addition to our actual bot traffic, human traffic in the Middle Eastern area where we operate can sometimes be atypical: old devices, behavior that might look fake, things like that. As a result, we were not doing very well according to Moat’s standard bot detection.”

When Ray first joined Online Lifestyle Network three years ago, bot traffic wasn’t a major issue. But as the company expanded, diversified its advertising offer, and started to compete at a higher level, the problem became increasingly pressing.

“Our traffic quality score was a rollercoaster,” he recalls. “We could be staying around 95% human traffic, then suddenly drop to 70% or even 50% one time, which are just unacceptable rates compared to our competition. Certain bots could just destroy us for one day, ruining our entire week or month. It was a major issue for us. We need to make sure advertisers know that their ads are seen by humans, otherwise we simply don’t get paid, and it doesn’t matter how much we invest in our content or how many people view it.”

The Solution: DataDome filters out all unwanted bots.

To combat the bot issue and bring the company’s Moat score to an acceptable level, Ray first created his own method to detect excessive requests, fake browsers and other signs of bot activity at the server level. However, he quickly found out that it wasn’t enough.

“I did get our score close to 95%, but to compete at the level where we want to be, you need 99%. It makes a big difference: with that kind of score, the huge suppliers will trust you with their advertising budgets, not just the medium-level ones”, he says.

Handling bot traffic in-house also required him to shift development resources into an area where they didn’t have real expertise.

“It’s exceedingly difficult, because you don’t really know what Moat considers as a bot. Even good bots could be affecting our score,” he recognizes. “Bots have also become very advanced, and they’re always changing, so it takes a team of security experts to keep up.”

Online Lifestyle Networks runs its websites on the Cloudflare CDN. While Cloudflare’s basic security measures provided some degree of protection, it wasn’t sufficient to get the Moat score to where it needed to be.

On the other hand, Ray and his team didn’t want to make major changes to their infrastructure, so they started to look for a bot protection solution that would easily integrate with their existing setup. They also needed the solution to support a couple of legacy websites, built on older technologies. Recommended by their hosting provider, DataDome met all their requirements. “The setup on our Windows servers was extremely easy,” says Ray.