lesfurets Secures APIs & Strengthens Reputation with DataDome
lesfurets is a well-known French online insurance and service comparison platform. With over a hundred insurance partners, lesfurets enables consumers to quickly and easily compare dozens of insurance quotes and select only the most relevant. To eliminate bots that were scraping prices via their APIs, lesfurets turned to DataDome. By blocking all unwanted traffic without any need for human intervention, the DataDome solution helps lesfurets ensure reliable KPIs and guarantee the quality of their lead flows, further strengthening its solid reputation with its insurance partners.
The Problem: Bots Abusing APIs & Polluting Traffic Data
“We’ve always been aware that some of our traffic was coming from bots,” explains Jean-Yves Fayel, SRE/DevOps at lesfurets. “From time to time, our insurance partners would alert us that they were seeing bots coming for prices via our APIs. So we created some in-house mechanisms and tools that enabled us to identify at least some of these bots, but identifying bots is a never-ending race.”
“The automated traffic wasn’t really having a direct impact on our business, but it was distorting our KPIs, our performance metrics,” adds CIO Grégory Anzel. “We take pride in being a data-driven company, and it wasn’t acceptable for us not to have reliable information on the proportion of bots in our traffic.”
Their CDN’s basic bot protection functionality helped block the least sophisticated bots, but the team was reluctant to press the button activating the advanced mode.
“We were a bit torn: we obviously didn’t want the bots to come through, but at the same time, we didn’t want to lose legitimate traffic,” Gregory explains.
“With the basic version, it was up to us to determine the right thresholds, but we wanted the help of artificial intelligence to make those decisions for us. We weren’t confident that our CDN could provide that help, as it’s not their core business; instead, we decided to look for a pure player whose business is all about bot detection.”
The Solution: Efficient API Protection on Autopilot
In their search for potential suppliers, the team placed particular emphasis on the proven efficiency and reputation of the future partner. They also wanted the chosen solution to require as little human intervention as possible.
“We’re very careful about the third parties we work with,” Grégory confides. “With its tech and data-focused DNA, and its truly automated solution, DataDome was an interesting partner for us. Our teams have a huge number of other tasks to attend to, and we wanted a solution that would allow us to spend a minimum of time on the topic.”
Implementing the solution was very straightforward and took less than half a day. In the dashboard, lesfurets’ teams could immediately see attacks on their different endpoints.
“We were really well supported by the pre-sales team,” says Jean-Yves. “They helped us fine-tune the configuration to understand our traffic, product views and endpoints. They were also very proactive, and provided us with an excellent data report to give us visibility on what was going on. The team was really top-notch.”
“The ‘try and buy’ approach is very interesting,” adds Grégory. “We installed the solution in monitoring mode with no financial commitment, and were able to see how it was operating in our own context. After the trial period, the decision was easy: let’s activate this artificial intelligence on our traffic, we trust DataDome to make the right blocking decisions.”
The Results: Time Savings, Reliable KPIs & Improved Lead Flow Quality
In line with the original objectives, the activation of the DataDome protection has enabled lesfurets to save time, improve the reliability of their KPIs, and bolster their reputation with their partners.
“Where our teams used to spend time estimating the proportion of bots, they no longer need to. We can rely on our performance metrics, without having to do any work on them,” says Grégory.
For a company that derives its revenue exclusively from its partner network, it’s also crucial to be able to guarantee high-quality lead flows.
“It’s now part of our sales pitch,” says Grégory. “Our job is to send leads to our partners. We already had a high-quality flow thanks to our content; now that we can guarantee that it’s bot-free, we have an even stronger position.”
In conclusion, the team commends the constructive collaboration with DataDome.
“It’s an effective solution, with a truly customer success-oriented team; we’ve been able to put it to the test. We can highly recommend DataDome.”
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