Many businesses mandate international growth as a pillar of how they want to develop their business in the medium-term. However, you can quickly hit a literal blockade in the planning stages by not being able to gather all the necessary information from competitors in the region if your scraping project relies on a single geographic perspective.
Since many businesses offer different prices and product information in each territory they operate within, it is essential to be able to access accurate business-critical data in advance of launching in a new location. To ensure that you have the fundamental infrastructure required to see the web through the eyes of your potential customers, anywhere in the world, you need to work with the best proxy provider to give you as many localized connections as possible.
Why the “global” internet is a myth
All major platforms on the Internet, including but not limited to Google, Amazon, and social networks like Meta, serve dynamic content based on the IP address of the user connecting to them. This means that whenever you browse the internet, you are only ever receiving a curated version of reality, localized to your current city. So if your data gathering process is only operating on the IP address of your office workspace, you will be literally flying blind.
Pricing, ad placements, and SEO rankings are all dependent on exactly where your access point to the internet is located. These can differ wildly from city to city, and especially country to country. The only way to ensure accurate data collection for these three elements is to use a proxy server in each city or country you wish to monitor, track, and target.
Failing to geo-target with a proxy while browsing the internet would be like trying to manage a global sales office while only listening to reports from one office in one city of one country. You would have a very fractured and incomplete view of the market reality.
The mechanics behind geo-targeting
Before we go any further, we should clearly define what we mean by geo-targeting. This is the practice of routing your connection through a specific, different server to where your actual computer or mobile device is located. It is always recommended to have servers physically located in every target region, so that your business can always access exactly what your customers see locally.
Now, using a proxy server in this way isn’t exactly about hiding your identity, but actually adopting a local one instead. By using a proxy located in a specific location, your scraper can then inherit those local trust signals of that area when accessing your selection of target websites, and bypass any regional filters that they may automatically apply.
The proxy server acts as your agent on the ground, or your sales officer in a new developing territory, ensuring that your scraper passes as a native user instead of a foreign bot, and feeding you accurate and up-to-date information on what your competitors are doing in your newest target region.
Protecting your ad spend & localized revenue
Two sides of the same coin are the way that you can protect your localized ad spend and revenue through using a proxy service. It is vital that you can verify that any ads you run in locations that require specific pricing and language are actually running; there’s nothing worse than running an advert in English when the country speaks Spanish! By having up-to-date information on your competitors’ pricing, you also protect your own revenue by ensuring your prices aren’t being inflated or altered by regional price discrimination algorithms.
Ad fraud costs companies worldwide billions of dollars annually. If you cannot verify your campaigns in the actual target region, you are paying for traffic that doesn’t actually exist. It’s a ghost on your tracking systems, regardless of what the advertisers’ dashboard actually tells you. Similarly, if your competition is pricing itself lower in a specific region, you need to be able to see that in real-time to make business-critical decisions that adjust your strategy to match or beat them at their own game. Geo-targeting, therefore, as become a direct revenue-protection tool. Your assumed marketing spend becomes verified market intelligence.
Scaling your regional footprint
Achieving true scale with your proxy provider requires you to use a service that allows you to pick proxies by both city and ASN (the specific internet provider network) rather than just by country. Having a combination of high concurrency and ASN granularity, you can cover as many bases as possible when it comes to verifying both adverts and data-gathering.
The workflow is simple. First, you must define your target regions. Second, distribute your requests to the target websites to avoid hitting any rate limits in a single geographical zone. Third, automate proxy rotation within that specific region to cover all your bases without triggering blocks across your entire IP pool.
Scale doesn’t mean just adding more requests to your scraping project, but rather adding more geographical endpoints. A professional setup should allow you to monitor 10, 50 or even 100 different regions for your business prospects simultaneously without manual intervention or tripping any web security wires in the process.
Don’t think about this as working harder, but rather a wider distribution across your data-gathering infrastructure. Your setup has to treat the entire global web as a local experience, whether you’re expanding into new territories in the next quarter or you’ve been marketing your company in the long-term on a different continent to where your head office is actually located.
Vetting your proxy provider for precision
As vital as being able to verify your ads display correctly in each individual region is the decision you make in selecting your proxy provider at the outset. You need to analyze the provider’s ability to prove their IPs actually sit in the target locations they claim, and that they aren’t faking their geo-data.
We say this because many providers guess the location of their proxy server rather than guarantee it exists. This becomes a problem if you need a proxy in Berlin to assess local SEO data, but the provider routes you through a server in Frankfurt and you cannot assess the performance accurately. The data is therefore then compromised. Only the best proxy provider will offer verified, granular accuracy on the locations of their server nodes.
Finally, all of this is to say that your business intelligence is only as accurate as the location data of your proxy. By vetting the provider before you build the scraping campaign and investing in multiples of server locations, you are protecting your money as much as your business. Geo-granularity is the final check to make before you commit your budget to a scraping campaign with a proxy provider.
Professional geo-targeted campaigns can supercharge your business
Now you should know that geo-targeting is no longer an optional feature of running a proxy server campaign; it is the core requirement for operating your procedures at a global scale. Adopting professional geo-targeting strategies is how you can mature your data-collection projects and give them a wider scope while not increasing the volume of human hours needed to manage the process.
Choosing the best proxy provider is the single most important act in any web scraping campaign, enabling your business to always see the web as your customers do. This ensures you maintain a clear and unobstructed competitive advantage in every market you enter, as well as the ones you have a long-history of operating within.
