RealClearPolitics Filters Invalid Traffic & Secures its Website With DataDome

The Problem: Identifying Invalid Advertising Traffic

When Ivan Delgado first reached out to DataDome, his main goal was to establish reliable traffic metrics. Like all digital publishers earning revenue from advertising, RealClearPolitics needs to ensure that its advertising customers don’t pay for invalid traffic (IVT)—a task easier said than done.

“One of our major advertising clients was using Moat Analytics to monitor the traffic we sent them, and they alerted us to the fact that our invalid traffic rate was higher than their threshold,” Ivan explains.

“We first attempted to prevent this unwanted traffic using built-in AWS blocking sets. We also tested another third-party service, but it failed to block the invalid traffic that Moat was detecting.”

One standout quality of RealClearPolitics’ legitimate human visitors is that they are very highly engaged—the average time on site is around 12 minutes—which can make real users look suspicious to all but the most advanced detection tools. By the same token, the non-human traffic also tends to follow unusual patterns.

“As a politics publisher, bot traffic to our website can be cyclical, with peaks around each election season,” Ivan points out.

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

Eager to get an efficient solution going and encouraged by DataDome’s client roster, Ivan and his team decided to give it a try.

“I was impressed with the setup and how everything works,” Ivan compliments. “The technology is really sophisticated. And the integration with a Lambda@Edge function on AWS was seamless.”

As one of the early adopters of AWS Lambda@Edge way back in 2017, DataDome leverages the feature to enable ultra-rapid deployment on Amazon CloudFront. The tight integration enables instant real-time bot protection at the edge, wherever the end-users are.

Although RealClearPolitics’ primary objective was to reliably identify invalid advertising traffic, the DataDome solution quickly began yielding other benefits as well.

“In the dashboard, we discovered a lot of scraper bots that we didn’t know were scraping our content, plus vulnerability scanners, DDoS attempts, and various other types of bad bot traffic,” Ivan observes.

The Results: Reliable Metrics, Stable Website Performance

Today, RealClearPolitics sees the DataDome solution as essential for not only ensuring reliable traffic metrics and stable IVT rates for advertising customers, but also for protecting the website and its contents from malicious activity.

“Since we implemented DataDome, we haven’t had any infiltrations or issues with vulnerability scanners trying to access our site, which translates to stable website performance,” Ivan says.

He also appreciates the industry-leading false positive rate (< 0.01%), and the fact that—on the rare occasion that a real user might get challenged—users see a CAPTCHA optimized for user experience, privacy compliance, and security.

“DataDome’s CAPTCHA gives us peace of mind. Not only does it block bot traffic, but we also know that our users’ experience remains uninterrupted. And because DataDome prioritizes privacy, we likewise don’t have to worry about violating compliance regulations,” he attests.

Since DataDome runs on autopilot, Ivan and his team primarily use the dashboard for easy configuration of custom rules, for example, to allowlist content syndication scrapers or other partners they’re working with.

However, there are also times where they keep an extra close eye on their traffic data and attack analytics.

“As mentioned, we have peaks of malicious traffic every two years. I’m glad to have DataDome running, because the last election season was quite smooth,” Ivan concludes.