France Marchés: “Before installing DataDome, our site was vulnerable and facing attacks.”

Sébastien Fernier, partner of the consulting firm IXCREO, is piloting the francemarches.com project on behalf of Publication des marchés. Two years ago, he was experiencing increasingly frequent problems with website performance. Unexplained traffic spikes slowed the loading of the site’s pages, and sometimes made the site completely unavailable.

“We were facing frequent attacks and, at certain times, the site would even go down,” Sébastien Fernier explains.

Since francemarches.com is a B2B site, its server capacity is dimensioned for a regular traffic level corresponding to its target audience. With this setup, it’s impossible to handle bot-generated traffic peaks correctly. As a result, this traffic has a direct impact on the site’s performance.

In addition, the public procurement notices published on the site represent exclusive information from the regional press, which constitutes a significant competitive advantage. The notices are indeed extremely useful to small and medium-sized companies seeking to position themselves in their local and regional markets.

“Business intelligence agencies are very interested in these notices, and don’t hesitate to set up automated software to scrape our site,” Sébastien Fernier emphasizes.

The case study of the news portal Le Parisien, which uses DataDome to protect its content against scrapers bots with an immediate 10% reduction of its server load as a result, prompted Sebastien Fernier to contact DataDome.

The protection was activated on francemarches.com in April 2017, and normal site performance was immediately restored.

The results: Peace of mind & new sources of revenue

“In the past year, we’ve had no more incidents that can be attributed to bots,” Sébastien Fernier proclaims.

Today, the illegitimate traffic blocked by DataDome on francemarches.com has dropped to 16%: A rate in line with what we typically see on niche sites once the protection is established, because many malicious bots end up being deterred by the protection.

The comprehensive content being francemarches.com’s primary asset, it’s no surprise that scrapers represent the majority of non-legitimate bots trying to access the site.

For Sébastien Fernier, the protection of the site’s data has above all provided him peace of mind. “It was an issue, it’s no longer an issue,” he says.

“Our main satisfaction is that the site is no longer interfered with, there are no more malicious intrusions and the site works as it should. Secondly, the DataDome protection makes scraping difficult. We can’t know if the solution blocks one hundred percent of the attempts, but we have a clue: a company which previously scraped our content has become a partner with a paid access. That’s our goal: To make the scrapers’ job so complicated that the operation is no longer profitable for them.”

One additional benefit: The DataDome solution also protects the personal data of registered users, thus contributing to the site’s compliance with the GDPR.

“It’s reassuring,” concludes Sébastien Fernier.