APOLLO Insurance Ends Competitive Price Scraping With DataDome

The Problem: Price Scraping Generates Fake Leads & Pollutes Lead Scoring Data

APOLLO Insurance is Canada’s leading online insurance provider. Customers are able to fill in a simple online application, and instantly receive a quote, purchase coverage, and policy documents.

Like in any e-commerce funnel, some users drop off during the process. For APOLLO, these mid-funnel users are leads that can be converted with assistance from the sales team. However, not all leads are equally valuable.

“The problem we had was that bots were putting in a lot of different data in the forms to understand our pricing models, which we obviously don’t want,” explains Klaus Salchner, Chief Technology Officer at APOLLO Insurance.

“These inputs also generated a lot of fake leads, and they polluted the data we use for lead scoring and other decision-making. So, in addition to the price scraping problem, it was causing a lot of waste throughout the organization: following up fake leads, blocking IP addresses, and cleansing data. We wanted to have this problem taken care of so that we could focus on our core business.”

The Solution: Automated Bot Detection & Blocking Integrated With AWS

When the team started searching for a scraping protection solution, their requirements were simple. They wanted a system that could dynamically detect malicious bots and block them from accessing the APOLLO platform, without generating a lot of maintenance overhead for the team.

“We wanted an automated tool that could run in the back end, abstracting the problem out of the organization,” Klaus observes.

“We identified four or five potential vendors, but some of them didn’t make it to the proof of concept stage because they insisted on selling us a full security platform. With the AWS capabilities we were already leveraging, we didn’t need to replace our firewall. We needed a solution that could solve this specific problem, and solve it very well. That’s what we found with DataDome.”

DataDome’s server-side module for Amazon CloudFront leverages the Lambda@Edge service to protect both cached and non-cached pages and minimize latency for end users. In addition to the standard Lambda@Edge integration, DataDome developed a customized Lambda function for a particular element of APOLLO’s infrastructure.

“While our particular setup meant that the integration wasn’t quite as straightforward as we had hoped, DataDome’s solutions engineers made up for it by going all in to service us as a customer,” Klaus comments. “The partnership and service definitely stood out.”

The Results: Protected Prices, Clean Data, Time & Energy Saved

Today, the DataDome bot detection solution does its job in the background, blocking unwanted visitors before they can start wreaking havoc on APOLLO’s platform. Confidential pricing information is protected, the platform’s lead scoring data can be trusted, and the organization no longer wastes time on false leads or IP blocking.

“We don’t have a bot problem at this stage,” Klaus confirms. “DataDome does what it needs to do. It saves us a lot of energy, and gives us confidence that no competitor can scrape our prices.”

The team also appreciates the intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard and reports. 

“In addition to the price scraping bots that we were already aware of, the dashboard has also revealed some additional things,” Klaus observes. “We’re seeing various bots that are not generating fake leads, or only doing so in very low volume; they are just trying to scrape our content. We definitely have a much clearer view of our traffic than before.”