Novice users across the world are normally choosing between Public and Dedicated (or Private) Proxies. And while the Public proxies may come for free, their use often creates problems related to security and abuse.
So, when it comes to professional proxy applications, individuals or companies tend to trust Private proxies (be it Residential or Data Center).
Simply put, Residential proxies are normally more expensive since you are getting IPs from the local Internet Service Providers, and most websites would not dare to ban them for the risk of losing potential clients. A Data Center proxy (or a DC proxy) is more affordable and can be used for applications where the use of a Residential proxy is not justified.
Based on our experience we have compiled the following list of the most common use cases of Private proxies by our customers. Of course, we are not limiting ourselves to these areas of application and expect the variety of cases to grow as we continue helping our clients solve their business tasks.
1. Market Research
Many major brands are using proxy-based solutions for conducting marketing research. This allows for gathering real data about the markets for making business decisions.
The process of data gathering and analysis is called “data harvesting”. It is required if you need to collect as much useful data as possible from online communities and forums. To do it faster you need special automated solutions that run on proxies.
We suggest using our reliable DC (Data Center) proxies for market research applications. Since we are dealing with public sources, you can save some money by using more affordable DC proxies. But keep in mind that to avoid captcha on search engines, you might need to apply for rotating proxies unless you are using some other anti-captcha solution.
2. Brand Protection
Proxies can also help you in managing your brand perception and control brand reputation risks.
Many high-valued brands face a risk of counterfeiting when their products become must-haves outside of the country of origin. With the help of proxies, companies can parse data from marketplaces, e-commerce, and other sites to check for potential brand abuse. This technique is especially useful when you are dealing with a counterfeit producer from another country that tries to restrict access to its website from the country native to the brand to continue illegal production and/or distribution.
Just like in the case of Market Research for Brand protection we advise using DC proxies that should perfectly suit this mission.
3. Travel Fare Aggregation
Another notable use case related to proxies is to ensure the operation of travel fare aggregators. These companies provide visitors with the best offers collected from websites of hotel chains and airlines. Usually, such websites implement protective measures against automated data harvesting.
Just like in the case with Market Research you could use proxies to search hundreds of other travel sites to find the best flight and hotel deals.
Travel fare aggregation is a perfect case for using Residential or DC proxies. They will ensure the required anonymity for your proxy crawlers in this application.
4. Ad Verification
Ad verification is another application of proxies that deals with detecting ad fraud, improving ad performance and, thus, protecting your brand.
Here you face a problem that may be caused by fake traffic generated by bots. As a result, many ads remain unseen by real people. Yet another concern is that competitors can also place your ads on porn sites and casino sites thus harming your brand image.
So, proxies here play an important role in improving ad performance and identifying fraudulent marketing activities.
5. Pricing Intelligence
You can use proxies to get real-time pricing data and easily track your competitors.
Online shops change their prices a zillion number of times on a daily basis. To keep up with the ever-changing markets and growing consumer price sensitivity, companies use intelligent solutions that deliver reliable pricing data in an automated fashion.
We recommend using dedicated rotating proxies for performing tasks related to price intelligence.
6. SEO Monitoring
If you want to keep your brand at the top of search page results, you need to work hard on that. There are many SEO tools and solutions that help companies to stay ahead of their competition.
Proxy-based solutions help to extract SERP data, search volume or ranking data for any keywords. When it comes to analyzing hundreds or even thousands of URLs of online products, you might definitely need a good and proven rotating datacenter proxy for your SEO needs.
7. Ad Intelligence
Say you have a product that you advertise online and your task is to track the ad statistics and performance. There are tools that help analyze your past ad campaigns to improve your future marketing efforts. Using proxies, such tools crawl the web and gather data for further processing to help you better allocate your ad budgets.
The tools that are used by companies involved in providing Ad Intelligence solutions are normally powered by DC or residential proxies depending on the type of task requested by the client.
8. Lead Generation
Lead Generation is another area of proxy application that deals with data harvesting. Here proxies help you gather information about your existing or potential customers. Companies offer services that involve Google scraping and parsing of social media profiles (on platforms like LinkedIn) to get the required information for you.
This is especially helpful if you need to find specific people that may be useful to your business i.e. decision-makers, prospect clients, buyers, etc. And proxies for lead generation again come in handy here working at the heart of such applications.
9. Reputation Intelligence
Proxies also come as a great help when you need to conduct a Reputation Intelligence analysis for your brand. Some companies offer services related to citation detection and review checking. Such online investigations help you reveal the actual picture with how your business is seen by your existing and potential clients and stay on top of the situation.
Since such checks require scraping not only search engines ranking pages but also numerous review aggregators (like Yelp and Trip Advisor) you will need to use reliable proxies along the way. For this mission, we recommend using DC and Residential proxies.
10. Instagram Proxies
The most common cases of using proxies for Instagram are related to the fact that the maximum number of Instagram accounts managed from one IP may not exceed 5. So, the SMM managers use proxies to overcome this limitation.
Another common case has to do with companies that employ Instagram account managers from across the World. Here proxies are used to avoid blocking or suspending the brand’s account activities on Instagram due to some ‘suspicious’ behavior.
For both cases, we can suggest using residential rotating proxies or mobile proxies that will resolve the issue of Instagram management IP limitations.
Conclusion
The list above includes some of the most general use cases of proxies suggested by our customers. Some cases are meant to appear more generic than others since the number of proxy applications grows with time and reflects the current state of Internet development. If you are considering using proxy server vs vpn, it would be wise to read this article to learn more on the subject.
We are proud to serve our customers’ needs and be ready to supply them with the required proxies for their applications. If your requirements fall into a category that was not described above, feel free to start a chat with our manager to identify the rotating proxies that will be right for you.
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