Masking your IP address may be handy when accessing blocked content or getting around anti-bot measures by search engines and other online services. Here are a few strategies for setting up proxies:
Residential IP addresses are those that are given to private residences by ISPs. Regional internet registries have marked these addresses as suspicious. Residential proxy use IP addresses because all requests sent through them are identical to those of typical users.
Datacenter proxy: These proxies don’t have an ISP connection, and their addresses are given out by hosting companies that have bought sizable pools of IP addresses.
Shared proxy: In this situation, multiple users may use a proxy simultaneously. These proxies may be data center-based, but ISPs also give customers access to this technology.
Specialized proxies: Dedicated proxies are private ones that only one user can use. Such a proxy can be purchased from specialized services, hosting companies, ISPs, or VPN providers.
Although each choice has advantages and disadvantages, businesses are increasingly choosing residential proxies. The primary factor is that real IP addresses from ISPs in various places (countries, states/regions, and cities) are provided by such proxies.
As a result, the real person attempts to connect with you when connecting to a party. A request sent by a potential user or customer won’t ever be attempted to be denied by a website or other online service.
For businesses, using a residential proxy opens up a lot of possibilities. Let’s discuss some actual use cases for residential proxies in the business world.
Why Companies Need Proxies
Today, up to 40% of all internet traffic is generated by bots, according to data from the bot-fighting company Distil Network.
A crucial fact is that not all bots, unlike search engine crawlers, are “good.” Many businesses are attempting to block the numerous bots used to gather information or competitive intelligence.
By 2017, roughly 21.80% of the 40% of bot-based traffic were “bad” bots. Owners of the website also attempted to ban them.
Real Information Gathering From Competitor Websites
One of the most well-known residential proxy use cases is competitive intelligence. It is now simple to track data center proxies and deny requests made with their assistance. Several prominent online services, including Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, have blocked entire ranges of IP addresses belonging to specific providers.
On the other hand, a residential proxy makes every request appear as though a natural person made it. Therefore, if it becomes necessary to send many requests, residential proxies enable sending them from various IP addresses in any nation, city, and local ISPs.
Brand defense
Brand protection and thwarting counterfeiters are two additional practical applications of residential proxy technology. For instance, Viagra drug makers might want to take on distributors of fake generic substitutes.
Such sellers typically block visitors from nations where the actual manufacturer’s offices are from accessing their websites. Due to this, it is more challenging to locate counterfeiters and take legal action against them. Residential proxies can obtain an IP address from the nation where the fake website is hosted and collect all the necessary information.
Performance evaluation and testing of software
Residential proxies can be used to test out new functions for mobile apps and websites. From various locations, developers can observe how their software functions for users. Additionally, sending numerous requests from multiple residential IP addresses is useful for testing how the software will behave under heavy load.
Moreover, performance monitoring can benefit from this technology. International businesses are interested in knowing how quickly their website loads for visitors from a specific nation—because of this, obtaining pertinent information is made more accessible by using residential proxy IP addresses.
Optimization of marketing and advertising
Ad campaigns must be tested to ensure the best results. Residential proxies can be used to check whether or not certain online ads are displayed, for instance, in search results for users from a particular location.
Additionally, using residential proxies makes it easier to evaluate the success of local SEO efforts: whether or not the website appears at the top of the results for specific search queries, how its ranking changes over time, etc.
When someone gathers information using the infrastructure of search engines, they do not like it. Because of this, these businesses continuously improve their anti-bot defenses, making it very challenging to collect information directly from search results.
However, if we send numerous search requests using residential proxies, it appears that real people are looking for something in various locations. Search engines do not block real users. Residential proxies are excellent for ensuring data retrieval from search engines.
Residential proxies are ideal for monitoring and evaluating the marketing efforts of rival companies. Both internal marketing teams and outside the marketing and advertising agencies use this technology.
Collective Content
Many companies in the Big Data era are based on gathering data from various sources and presenting the resulting view on their platforms. Residential proxies are required by such services to maintain their databases of the compiled content.
Without this tool, it would be difficult to maintain data accuracy on, say, prices for a specific type of good across multiple e-commerce websites. These activities are prohibited on these websites for fear of the company making unreasonable demands.
For instance, you’ll need a bot that visits relevant pages and refreshes them if you want to create a comparison table that is regularly updated with the prices of vacuum cleaners from 20 different websites. Anti-bot systems will probably reject such requests, but a residential proxy can be used to get around these data security measures.
Data gathering and analysis on demand
Companies professionally involved in on-demand data collection and analysis have been developing over the last few years. Services like PromptCloud create web-crawling software crawlers that browse the web and gather data relevant to predefined profiles. This information is utilized for marketing, sales, or competitive intelligence.
Residential proxies help these crawlers overcome obstacles like blocks and anti-spam filters to complete their tasks.
Utilizing Local Discounts to Save
Residential IPs can help businesses find cost-saving opportunities. For instance, many websites for booking hotels and flights feature promotions based on geographic location. Such discounts, which could result in savings, can be seen and activated using residential proxies.
Conclusion
Businesses may benefit from the ability to simulate requests from actual users using a real, local IP address. Businesses frequently use this technology for data collection, testing, accessing various web resources, and other purposes.