Build vs. Buy: How Danone saved hundreds of thousands of Euros by switching to ContentKing

Danone is a leading global food & beverage company across waters, dairy, plant based and specialised nutrition with over 100,000 employees in more than 55 countries all over the globe.

Danone's achievements:

Freed up budgets thanks to significant cost savings
Collaboration boosted, thanks to portal integration
eCommerce SEO disasters prevented, thanks to monitoring

Danone (opens in a new tab) is a leading global food & beverage company across waters, dairy, plant based and specialised nutrition.

The company is based in Paris and employs over 100,000 employees in more than 55 countries all over the globe.

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 ContentKing, which comes with all the desired features out of the box.

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

ContentKing continually monitors 1.5 million URLs globally, at scale and without the constant maintenance previously required by our custom AWS bot. ContentKing 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 ContentKing. Using the ContentKing APIs, the Danone team integrated the ContentKing data into the Danone Digital Health Tool, a portal used by Danone marketers all around the globe.

The results

Switching to ContentKing yielded various high-impact results:

1. Freed up budgets thanks to significant cost savings

The cost savings brought by ContentKing are two-fold.

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

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

Second, the automation provided by ContentKing'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 ContentKing.

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, ContentKing quickly showed us its value:

We have had dozens of situations since we implemented ContentKing 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, ContentKing's Change Tracking™ feature provides a very handy changelog when doing releases and migrations:

ContentKing 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 ContentKing as their SEO monitoring solution has been the right choice for Danone.

Stop relying on expensive in-house solutions. With ContentKing you get SEO insurance out of the box.

Start your free trial and discover what ContentKing can do for your organization!