Jooble Boosts Customer Satisfaction With DataDome

The Problem: Crawlers Bypass Protection, Skewing Analytics

When you’re serving 70 million human users monthly, it’s probably only to be expected that hordes of scraper bots will also want in on the party. Founded as a job aggregation website in 2006, Jooble has dealt with crawlers for as long as Nazim Suleimanov, Head of Engineering, can remember.

“Initially, we developed our own algorithm to detect the crawlers,” he explains, “and for at least 10 years, it actually worked pretty well. But the bots were becoming smarter and smarter, and staying ahead of them was beginning to take up way too much of our time.”

For Jooble as for other job aggregators, the main trouble with bots is that they skew the website’s analytics and drag down conversion rates.

“Many of our properties are aggregation sites, with links to other websites. If bots are following these links, we’re effectively sending bot traffic to our clients,” Nazim explains. “Any bots we can identify are obviously cleared out from our statistics, so our customers don’t pay for that traffic, but we knew that we weren’t catching them all. We needed to find a solution that could automate the traffic cleaning process.”

The Solution: Proven, Easy-to-Integrate Bot Protection

In their evaluation of different tools, Nazim and his team were paying particular attention to customer references, price, and integration options.

“We wanted a solution that was already used by other big companies, which proves that it works, and of course the price must be right,” says Nazim. “In terms of integration, we were looking for a service that would give us flexibility and control over which requests should be sent to the bot management provider. The fact that DataDome can be integrated with Nginx on the software side was a major advantage.”

Once the decision was made, setting up DataDome was quick and painless. “It was very easy,” Nazim confirms. “One person carried out the integration, and it didn’t take more than one day.”

The Results: Clean Traffic, Happy Customers

Today, all traffic statistics Jooble sends to customers are clean from bots — and their customers can tell the difference.

“A couple of weeks after we activated the protection, I asked for feedback from some key customers, and they told me they didn’t see any bots anymore,” Nazim attests. “A few months later, we did a customer survey. Those who track statistics confirmed that the traffic quality has improved, and some of them shared very positive results in terms of conversion rates and cost per application.”

By automating their bot protection, Jooble’s engineering team has also freed up significant time to work on more interesting, revenue-generating projects.

“We didn’t track how much time we spent on bot mitigation before we implemented DataDome. But I’d estimate that three people spent approximately ten hours each every month, so that’s 30 work hours saved,” Nazim concludes.