Boosting Efficiency & Reputation: HealthCentral’s DataDome Success Story

The Problem: Bots Stealing Content & Polluting Reports

HealthCentral operates a digital media platform serving patients with chronic illness and their caregivers, as well as physicians and other healthcare professionals. As a publisher making its revenue from ads, the company’s business depends on generating real traffic from real people—and being able to prove it.

“Ten or 15 years ago, you could walk into a boardroom, present your spreadsheet showing that the customer wanted 30 million impressions and you gave them 35 million, and everyone was happy,” says Peter Nilsson, CTO at HealthCentral. “Today, it’s a different story. If you don’t know every detail of your property, your delivery, and your traffic, advertisers will absolutely challenge you and pick your reports apart.”

Like all public websites delivering high-quality content to large audiences, HealthCentral’s platforms were under constant attack from scraper bots. Besides stealing and republishing proprietary content for the benefit of cybercriminals, the bots were also polluting HealthCentral’s traffic analytics and generating extra work for multiple teams.

“When you don’t have any sort of tool protecting you against bots, you have to separate out the invalid traffic on the tagging and the reporting side,” Peter points out. “But it takes a lot of time, and there’s always a risk of missing things.”

The Solution: Flexible, Well-Supported Bot Protection

At one point, Peter and his team decided that manual bot mitigation and traffic analysis was no longer sustainable. But they wondered, what type of solution should we choose?

“You look through the landscape and find a ton of different ways to approach this subject,” Peter observes. “There are homegrown systems, hardware solutions, firewalls, and others that will give you a certain level of protection, but we didn’t find them efficient enough. On the flip side of this coin, you can also have a solution that is super safe, but prevents true traffic from getting through, which is almost the worst case scenario for us.”

The team set out to search for an accurate, flexible solution that would fit their existing infrastructure, and that could help them optimize analytics and reporting efficiency. They were thrilled to discover that, with an easy-to-implement CloudFront module (based on the Lambda@Edge service) and a real-time, customizable dashboard, DataDome ticked all the boxes.

“Our setup isn’t unique in any way, but with the number of sites we have, there are a few things that aren’t completely standard. We wanted a partner who could work with us to form a solution that was appropriate for our infrastructure, but also flexible enough from a traffic and reporting perspective,” Peter comments.

“DataDome was very easy to understand and to implement, and if anything didn’t work exactly the way we expected, it was easy to get fixed. The onboarding team was always responsive, and clearly cared about aligning with us and what we were trying to accomplish.”

The Results: Reliable Traffic Data, Bolstered Reputation

For Peter, the greatest advantage of implementing DataDome is the consistency, accuracy, and automation of HealthCentral’s traffic reporting.

“We know that what we’re promising our customers is real. We can pull reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or even give them a snapshot of how their campaigns are doing at any given time, and trust that our data tell the truth,” he attests. “It also saves us a lot of time, as the whole thing is automated in a way that we couldn’t do before.”

The improved reliability translates into both direct and indirect financial benefits.

“Let’s say you’re running a million-dollar campaign, but your client doesn’t trust your traffic data, and cuts it back by 20%. That’s already a big direct loss, without even taking into account the time and resources spent,” Peter observes.

“But what’s even more important is our reputation in the industry. Our clients are some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, and if they’re happy with the quality of the traffic and the responses they’re getting, they will keep coming back. But if you lose them once, it’s very hard to get back in. So, reputation is extremely important, and consistent reporting really helps us prove that we’re a trustworthy partner for them.”

In conclusion, Peter praises the easy and constructive collaboration with DataDome.

“Choosing technology partners isn’t rocket science,” he smiles. “One of the things that I personally value most is being able to have a real and honest conversation with the teams that are supporting you. You can have a class A product, but if it doesn’t work the way the customer wants it to, it doesn’t matter. So it’s really important to choose partners that are willing to work with you, and that’s what we found in DataDome.”