As digital marketing becomes more prevalent, consuming an ever-larger share of the overall marketing budget, companies need clearer oversight of how they’re spending their funds. One way that many digital marketing experts are turning is towards the use of proxy servers. This is to give them an accurate understanding of how their campaigns are performing in foreign territories, to conduct competitor research, and even to automate their social media presence.
Now, you may be thinking: why would I need to use a proxy server to do this? The answer lies within the issues that you can encounter by only ever using your office IP address to access this data. An example of this is where search engines can trigger spam detection on your IP address when you make multiple searches for the same keyword across a number of different country domains (ccTLDs). Read on to understand more situations where using a proxy for competitor research can be very useful indeed.
Monitor your competitors’ prices anonymously
Most digital marketers will be trying to keep a close eye on the pricing of their competitors’ products. However, you can run into a brick wall if your competitor has a fair idea of who you are. For example, if your company’s head office is based in an unusual city, and you are likely the only frequent visitor from that location to your competitor’s website, they could look to block your IP address from accessing their domain.
Your solution here is to use a proxy server, connecting to your competitor’s website with an IP address based in a different city. BestProxy offers over 60 different locations in the United States, as well as offering services across more than 100 countries, giving you total control over where you’d like to access from.
Once you have connected through your proxy server, you can now anonymously review your competitor’s product availability and their pricing strategy as often as you need. Setting up a dedicated proxy server for your business does not cost a lot of money, and it guarantees that you will always be able to access the latest information that your competitors are sharing, no matter where in the world you are.
Geo-targeted advert oversight is important
It’s not only competitor websites that digital marketers need to keep an eye on. It is also advertising placements. In particular, proxy servers can be extremely useful to assess geo-targeted ads that your competitor is running. This way, digital marketers are able to document the exact ad campaigns that competitors are running, ensuring that they’re not on the back foot.
Having a dedicated proxy server based in each of the territories that you want to review your competitors from guarantees you can always access the current adverts being run anywhere in the world. It is also fair to say that this is even a useful way for digital marketing teams to verify that their own ads are appearing correctly in each nation – there is nothing worse than finding out that the reason your advertising campaign hasn’t worked in Montreal is that you ran the English language advert instead of the French!
Using a proxy server also works for reviewing search engine ad placements as well, by allowing you to search for your competitor’s brand name keyword in each territory that you want to keep an eye on, connecting to a dedicated server and static IP address in that country.
Social media presence can be geo-blocked
Many companies also operate specific social media channels per territory, alongside running geo-targeted ad campaigns on the platform. Due to licensing restrictions and other common digital marketing tactics, you can sometimes find yourself locked out of viewing your competitor’s presence in other countries. Once again, the best solution to monitor your competitor is to use a proxy server based in the country for which you want to track.
Another reason that digital marketers use a proxy service for social media management is that most platforms do not react well when a user logs into an account from multiple different IP addresses across the world. To make sure you aren’t locked out of your brand account, you should use one dedicated static IP address to always connect to your social platform from one location.
This is especially true when managing a business account via any of the excellent third-party platforms, which may be based in a different country to your business and cause the social platform to lock you out when setting up your automated posting and analytical tools. You should use a proxy server in the same country as your third-party tool is based to access your brand account, ensuring that the platform never shuts you out.
Track SEO keyword performance across territories
One final useful function of proxies for digital marketers is to track SEO keyword performance across different countries. It is common for all major search engines to detect multiple searches for the same keyword from the same IP address as spam detection. This is for two reasons: one is that you could type your competitor’s brand name multiple times just to trigger their own brand ads and cost their marketing budget with your unintentional searches; another is that typing your own brand name multiple times and clicking on different search results each time can intentionally influence how a search engine ranks your brand name or webpages.
You can avoid your searches being detected as spam by choosing to connect to a proxy server for each territory that you want to assess the SEO keywords in. Search engines will recognise your IP address across all ccTLDs, meaning that your searches will become ineffective after just a few different countries. Connecting via a dedicated static IP in each country is the best way to generate the most accurate results and ensure that you don’t find yourself falling foul of a spam filter.
In whichever way you need to monitor your competitors, it is becoming best practice to always do it via a proxy server. Anonymously tracking product prices, assessing SEO keyword performance, and even monitoring geo-targeted ad placements, the one solution is to purchase a dedicated static IP address for each function, in each relevant territory, giving you total confidence and control that you will always be able to keep an eye on your competitors and one step ahead of them in the digital marketing world.
