Build vs. Buy: How Danone saved hundreds of thousands of Euros by switching to Conductor Website Monitoring

About Danone

Headquarters

Paris, France

Company Size

100,000+

Industry

Retail

The challenge

Danone operates more than 600 websites worldwide, and was relying on an in-house developed custom bot to monitor these for technical issues impacting organic search performance.

This custom in-house solution was costly to build and to maintain. When the digital team at Danone wanted to expand the feature set and also include JS rendering, it quickly became clear that this wasn't economically feasible. The cost was estimated at hundreds of thousands of Euros, with a development time of 1 to 2 years.

It was time to start looking for alternative options.

The solution

Danone found the perfect solution in Conductor Website Monitoring, which comes with all the desired features out of the box.

Thanks to its ease of use, complemented with Conductor Website Monitoring's onboarding service, the Danone team was up and running in no time, monitoring more than 600 websites and 1.5 million URLs.

Conductor Website Monitoring continually monitors 1.5 million URLs globally, at scale and without the constant maintenance previously required by our custom AWS bot. Conductor Website Monitoring is the glue that stitches together what technical issues are holding back performance of local websites at scale.

Soon, the digital team found a way to yield even more value from Conductor Website Monitoring. Using the Conductor Website Monitoring APIs, the Danone team integrated the Conductor Website Monitoring data into the Danone Digital Health Tool, a portal used by Danone marketers all around the globe.

The results

Switching to Conductor Website Monitoring yielded various high-impact results:

1. Freed up budgets thanks to significant cost savings

The cost savings brought by Conductor Website Monitoring are two-fold.

First, there's the enormous reduction in costs for no longer having to maintain the expensive in-house built solution:

Conductor Website Monitoring saved us hundreds of thousands in development if we tried to replicate just part of what Conductor Website Monitoring does for us out of the box.

Second, the automation provided by Conductor Website Monitoring's 24/7 Monitoring™ streamlined Danone's workflow significantly:

We can now run SEO audits daily across websites and track when items are fixed/resolved automatically. Previously this involved manual checks and updates to excel docs or JIRA tickets. This saves us at least several hours per month per website.

And with more than 600 websites, that sure adds up.

2. Collaboration boosted, thanks to portal integration

Thanks to the integration with Danone's digital portal, teams from all over the globe are working with the data provided by Conductor Website Monitoring.

From digital teams, to marketing, brand and content creation teams, the portal is used by a wide array of people. Even external agencies can easily work with the data, on a single platform delivering a unified experience to Danone teams worldwide.

3. eCommerce SEO disasters prevented, thanks to monitoring

As for the 24/7 Monitoring™ across 600+ websites, Conductor Website Monitoring quickly showed us its value:

We have had dozens of situations since we implemented Conductor Website Monitoring such as websites being uncrawlable because they were down or noindex tags were added to them.

Thanks to alerting we knew about it before the agency noticed the issue and the traffic started to decline.

Moreover, Conductor Website Monitoring's Change Tracking™ feature provides a very handy changelog when doing releases and migrations:

Conductor Website Monitoring also allows us to flag what was actually changed or broken and when the issue occurred so we can trace the issue back to a particular release or migration.

To conclude: from significant cost savings, freeing up budget for other initiatives, to global collaboration and disaster prevention, it became apparent that selecting Conductor Website Monitoring as their SEO monitoring solution has been the right choice for Danone.