JobLookup Ends Job Ad Fraud & Keeps Customers Happy With DataDome

Higher job application ratios, happier customers

Significant time savings

More efficient vetting of new partners

Ad fraud Marketplaces & classifieds

JobLookup is a UK-based job board and online resource for job seekers and employers. In addition to hosting tens of thousands of job ads, the site has a variety of tools and tips for jobseekers, including a CV Wizard and Ultimate Jobseeker Guide. Employers and recruiters can find a wealth of industry focused articles, recruitment software solutions, and fast, effective job posting.

The Problem: Bot traffic skews analytics & KPIs.

“We always strive to provide the best possible service to the recruiters we serve, and continuously ask for and monitor feedback from them to achieve that”, says Ben Behnam, Chief Executive Officer at JobLookup.

“We were starting to get reports that our job ads weren’t performing as well as they used to. When we investigated, we found that while certain visitors to our website looked like ordinary job seekers, their browsing behaviour didn’t resemble that of actual humans.”

JobLookup provides recruiters with a platform to advertise vacant jobs. In return, advertisers expect (and pay for) qualified applications. The suspicious visitors would browse large numbers of ads, but never apply for jobs. As a result, JobLookup’s application ratio—an important KPI for the company—had significantly dropped.

“We distribute content and generate job seeker traffic via a network of partners,” Ben explains. “Unfortunately, bots are often used to generate artificial clicks to increase revenue, in a similar way to what’s happening on Google Ads and other advertising networks. Weeding out these artificial clicks is a real challenge for the whole sector. We don’t want to bill our customers for illegitimate traffic. That just results in unhappy clients, and we want our business partnerships to be beneficial for everyone.”

The Solution: DataDome detects & identifies fraudulent traffic.

Bots were around long before JobLookup first launched, but they have become progressively more difficult to detect. Initially, the company filtered out bot traffic with the help of custom rules, such as validating user agents, or via cookie solutions and request monitoring.

But in the IT world, products improve, and bots are no exception. The most advanced bots are now extremely skilled at mimicking human behavior, and staying ahead of them is a full-time job.

“While the majority of our traffic was legitimate, bad bots were increasing,” says Ben. “We had two engineers constantly analyzing data and log files, trying to discover new bots and come up with new methods to stop them, instead of building and expanding our product. So we eventually decided it was time to look for an external service instead of doing this in-house.”

After a bit of research into what JobLookup’s clients and competitors were doing to handle unwanted bot traffic, they had established a shortlist of potential solutions.

“We wanted a flexible solution we could adopt without making major changes to our application, which runs on an Apache web server. We also wanted to be able to test it before committing to an agreement,” Ben explains. “DataDome satisfied both criteria. In fact, we implemented the free trial and tested everything completely on our own. It was much easier than the other solutions we evaluated.”

The Results: Significant time savings, happier customers.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Apache hosted websites bot protection. Today, the DataDome bot protection solution collects and analyzes more than 250 events for every single request to JobLookup.com, and makes extensive use of online machine learning to detect and identify both familiar bots and new bot patterns. Each request is also enriched with ID tags in real-time, enabling the JobLookup team to integrate this bot data into its own server logs and analytics tools.

“It’s given us freedom,” says Ben. “Fighting bots is a real challenge, and it’s an ongoing thing which can exhaust your team. We used to spend 20% of our time dealing with bots, whereas now, we spend less than a day per month. With DataDome, we have regained the freedom to work on more important things.”

The biggest benefit, however, has been the boost to JobLookup’s customer satisfaction levels. Thanks to DataDome, the company can now provide clean, verifiable traffic data to its clients and bill them accurately.

“Illegitimate traffic has a direct effect on our reputation with customers and prospects”, Ben points out. “If we can’t detect and filter out bots, our job application ratios suffer. Clients may stop working with us, and we may lose potential new customers in the future. Saving time is great, but delivering an excellent service and keeping our customers happy is much more important in the long term.”

Last, but not least, the team also harnesses the DataDome solution to vet potential new traffic sources. Like all advertisers, JobLookup is always looking to expand its partner network and attract new job seekers to the site. But new partners mean new challenges, as the company needs to ensure the quality of the traffic they deliver.

“In the past, it was mostly by trial and error,” Ben explains. “We had to wait for our customers’ feedback to find out how a new source of traffic was performing. With DataDome, we can instantly see whether a new partner is bringing us the kind of traffic we want to provide to our clients or not, and that means we can expand our network with confidence.”