The need for internet anonymity and online security has brought about the establishment of residential proxies. Residential proxies work as an intermediary between an internet user and the internet. The residential proxies mask a person’s actual IP address. Instead of showing the actual IP address, they show a secure IP address that cannot be traced back to the user.
Upon their inception, residential proxies were used for personal internet security and anonymity. However, residential proxies have also become popular among businesses. The main factor behind the heightened use of residential proxies by brands is the high number of websites that ban bots on their sites. The banning of bots on websites restricts businesses from acquiring necessary data and information that is key for their normal functioning.
Businesses conventionally use residential proxies to mask their true identity and location. This specific use case offers business owners numerous benefits. The brands choose a location, and the IP address shown allows them to access websites and services online as if they are real users in the stipulated area.
However, not all business owners are aware of how residential proxies can work to their advantage. This article highlights some benefits that businesses can garner from using residential proxies.
Fight Against Counterfeits
As a business owner, it is quite disheartening to discover that a brand has started developing generic products that aim to copy yours. Sadly, this is the reality today, as numerous businesses produce generic products.
The businesses that manufacture and distribute or sell generic products do this in hiding. In most cases, you will find that a business starts developing generic products of a company that is not in their country. This often helps the businesses producing and selling generic products stay in hiding and avoid facing legal action from the main company.
As already ascertained, the businesses making and selling generic products often do so in a different country. As an additional precaution, they prevent internet traffic originating from the country where the genuine company is located. They do this to stay under the radar and stay unidentified.
Business owners often aim to identify and sue companies making generic products. This is an easy task when using viable residential proxies. The residential proxies help mask the business owner’s actual location. This allows them to access sites that contain generic products.
By gaining access to the sites selling generic products, they can track the origin of the generic products and initiate a case against them. The use of residential proxies in the fight against counterfeit products helps business owners maintain their brand image and client trust.
Market Monitoring & Price Adjustment
To ensure a business is successful, the brand has to offer good value at competitive prices. However, in this era of businesses using e-commerce platforms to venture into new countries across the globe, it can be tough to offer good value at competitive prices.
The prices for commodities or services often vary depending on the location. It is, therefore, paramount that a business adjusts the prices of its services or products to match the market prices of the specific locations.
Residential proxies come in handy when monitoring different regional markets and product or service prices across them. The residential proxies help business owners access websites that are often geo-restricted without any difficulties. Once they access the geo-restricted sites, they can collect pricing information for the specific product or service.
With pricing information, the business owner can adjust their prices to match the market prices of the target region. This is key to helping increase the chances of a business succeeding, especially when expanding to a new global market.
Advertising
Advertising is a key marketing function that is essential for the success of any business. Advertising entails creating awareness of your brand and the products or services that it offers. In the past, advertisements were highly generalized.
However, modern technology has allowed business owners to curate and distribute more targeted ads that have higher efficiency. Targeted advertising is based on numerous client attributes such as age, gender, character, physical location, etc. Physical location is the easiest attribute that businesses can use to curate their targeted ads.
The use of location-specific ads can easily be proven by the fact that people in different locations will get different ads on their google search. This occurs even if the people searched for similar things. When a business deploys an ad that is intended for a particular region, it can be tough to view the ad, the way the client will view it.
Using residential proxies, business owners can set their location to that of the targeted ad location. They can then view the ads easily and ascertain the ads are perfect, and if not, changes can be made to ensure the ROI on the ads is high.
Business Website Testing
As ascertained above, most businesses are expanding and delving into global markets. When a business is looking to expand into new countries, one important thing is the business’ website. When going global, the business website is the first point of contact between the leads and the business.
Having a well-designed, structured, and informative website is good, but all these are pointless if the site is not reliable. A business has to ensure that they also improve its website performance when the business expands. The site should have the capability to handle an increased number of user requests.
The main weak point for websites when brands go international is slowed service or complete failure of the site due to increased users. Business owners can employ the use of residential proxies to test their site’s reliability. Through the use of proxies, they can simulate increased user requests from various regions globally.
If the website fails during the testing, necessary technical reliability changes are made to improve it. Simulating increased website traffic using residential proxies is carried out until the site attains a satisfactory level of request handling.
Conclusion
Using residential proxies to simulate real users with genuine IP addresses from varying locations is bound to become more popular. This is due to its integral part to play in helping businesses collect data. The ability to collect data online without limitation offers business owners numerous benefits.
