LifeworQ Stops Click Fraud & Frees Up Engineer With DataDome

The Problem: Bots were clicking job ads, driving up costs, and undermining credibility.

Björn Müllenmeister is the Managing Director of LifeworQ Jobs GmbH, the company behind LifeworQ. Because LifeworQ’s revenue comes from advertising jobs and selling traffic to other job boards, it’s in their best interests to keep traffic to those listings as human as possible. But Björn quickly realized this wasn’t always the case:

“When we launched our first job ads,” Björn explains, “we could see that there was some traffic we couldn’t identify as human. When you see hundreds of clicks on a job ad in eight milliseconds coming from the same IP, then you know there’s a problem you need to take care of.”

Protection against click fraud is important for advertisers who pay for every click, but it’s important for publishers too. It’s hard to convince companies to pay you for advertising their jobs if a big chunk of the traffic you send their way are bots, not qualified candidates.

At first, LifeworQ tried to solve their bot problem manually. This meant looking into single clicks to determine whether a particular IP was a bot or not. A time-consuming process, to say the least, so they developed an in-house solution instead. This worked well at first, but it took up all the time of a key developer on their team. Additionally, bot development never stands still:

“If you have your own solution,” Bjorn says, “you have to keep up with the world of bots. It’s really hard to always know the latest bot developments. So our in-house solution became too expensive to maintain.”

The Solution: DataDome filters out all bad bot traffic and stays ahead of the latest bot trends.

The developer who had created LifeworQ’s in-house bot management solution and who was in charge of maintaining it realized it was unrealistic to keep up. So he started looking for an external solution.

As he was browsing for guidance on bot management solutions, he discovered the scientific publications of one of DataDome’s threat researchers, and was impressed. He immediately contacted our sales team.

When they installed DataDome and opened the dashboard, they noticed hacking attempts, SQL injections, DDoS attacks, scraper bots, and bots committing click fraud. Because the DataDome bot management solution proved both easy to deploy and effective, LifeworQ didn’t spend any time looking for other providers. They’ve been a happy customer ever since.

The Results: No more click fraud and significant time savings.

DataDome now filters out all bad bot traffic for LifeworQ. More importantly, it does so automatically. No longer does a developer need to dedicate all his working hours to maintaining an in-house solution. As of today, LifeworQ spends perhaps one hour a week on bot management, versus the 40-ish hours a week it took them previously.

This means LifeworQ can focus on pushing revenue and reducing costs. Additionally, they can now confidently show their clients that they’re blocking bad bot traffic with a solution that isn’t their own (and so cannot be gamed).