Cairn Leverages Accurate Web Traffic Analytics With DataDome
Cairn.info is the result of an alliance between four publishing houses (Belin, De Boeck, La Découverte, and Erès). Its aim is to improve its partners’ online presence, and to offer the necessary technical and commercial tools to other organizations that wish to create an electronic version of their publications.
As such, Cairn.info offers online access to full-text research publications in the humanities and social sciences, mainly for students, researchers and professionals in these disciplines.
The publishing houses and academic institutions that entrust their books and magazines to Cairn for publication expect, besides additional revenues, a wider and more international audience for their publications, but also better knowledge of their readership.
In order to be able to transmit reliable and consistent information to its partners, it is therefore essential for Cairn to identify and qualify its visitors.
The Problem: Skewed analytics.
The qualification effort quickly revealed that a click doesn’t equal an actual reading. This is especially true when the content can be accessed for free and without prior authentication, which is the case for more than half of the 400,000 documents that are published on Cairn.info.
The team looked at the breakdown between hits from known institutions or identified individuals on one hand, and those coming from anonymous visitors on the other. They found that anonymous visits had increased sharply over the past two years, at a much higher rate than the steady increase they had observed in previous years.
A detailed analysis revealed that many of these visitors were bots, not human visitors. And alongside the bots from major search engines, social networks and known feed aggregators, all sorts of new unidentified, even “clandestine”, bots had proliferated.
“This intensive traffic burdened our technical infrastructure, and forced us to oversize it for the actual use of our portal,” explains Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire, Director of Operations and cofounder at Cairn.info.
“In addition, certain denial of service attacks had temporarily slowed down or even paralyzed our site, even though our host has the infrastructure to effectively protect us against this type of malicious actions. But the most important negative impact wasn’t technical: our main problem was that the proliferation of bot traffic interfered with the analytics data that we transmit to the publishers and universities we serve.”
The Solution: Cleaning up website traffic with DataDome.
The Cairn team met DataDome at a trade show. They were quickly convinced by the simplicity and efficiency of the technology, as well as by their discussion partners’ technical and marketing expertise.
Since the protection was activated, there have been a few cases where institutional clients who wished to legitimately collect data from Cairn.info were blocked. If this happens, the Cairn team just needs to tag the partner bot as a “good bot” via the DataDome dashboard, and access is opened immediately.
The Results: Reliable analytics & better data protection.
Which benefits does Cairn derive from the daily use of DataDome?
“Above all, it brings greater reliability to the analysis of real usage patterns,” says Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire. “In our industry, unless you care most about showing off and flashing the highest possible numbers at any cost, it’s crucial to have access to scrubbed and refined data, in order to carry out quality editorial analyses.”
“Moreover, it helps us to better understand the use of our site by online businesses that are scraping or trying to scrape our content,” he continues. “Once these parties have been identified, a mutually beneficial dialogue can be initiated with those that seem most committed to creating added value.”
The impending implementation of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) also played a role in Cairn’s interest in bot protection solutions. In addition to securing access to databases (encryption, IP filtering, etc.), the ability to block attempted attacks from hackers or “impersonators” contributes to Cairn’s efforts to protect the information their users have entrusted them with, in line with this European regulation.
