Data is fast becoming as useful and expansive a commodity as oil - just think of the massive data centers that companies like Amazon Web Services are investing in across the globe. If your market research is based on bad data, localized to your computer and not your client’s location, you aren’t just wasting time but making bad decisions which can waste your money.
The internet is becoming increasingly personalized, meaning that every site you visit uses your IP to show you what they think you want to see. Using a proxy network has become an essential tool to avoid these extra layers and allow you to see the clear, unfiltered information. Today, we’ll look at how you can give your business the best possible chance of success by using proxy networks.
Why your digital fingerprint is a liability
Everyone from Google to your favourite grocery store and your choice of social media platforms will customize your web experience and search results based on your location, device type, and previous browsing history.
This can become a liability when you’re researching competitors' product or service prices. The site may detect that you’re a returning user and perhaps serve you a dynamic price, which could be either higher (in the case of airlines and hotels) or lower (for sales or first-time buyers of products) than the actual retail price served to a user viewing the page for the first time. Your digital fingerprint ultimately compromises the integrity of your research.
Consider the idea of accessing the internet through a proxy network as if browsing in incognito mode on steroids. Not only does it hide your history, but it also forces the website to present the baseline, neutral data and information that a random, anonymous prospective customer would also see.
Unlocking accurate competitor and pricing analysis
More and more retailers are switching to an algorithmic pricing strategy for their products or services. So that you can ensure you are always seeing an accurate price when doing competitor analysis, you need to rotate through different proxy locations. Businesses constantly change their prices nowadays, so you can monitor these real-time fluctuations across different regions or shopper profiles by using a proxy server to access the data.
It is not uncommon for a retailer to show an item as “out of stock” in certain zip codes, high-traffic areas, or to specific IP addresses, while still showing as available in other locations. Of course, this is most commonly due to differentiation in stock levels across warehouse locations, but to see the true inventory landscape, you’ll need to use a proxy network to check the same item in different locations.
At the end of the day, the point of running a pricing analysis on your competitors is to ensure that your own products or services remain competitive comparatively on a reliable basis. It is therefore essential to ensure that you aren’t just scraping data, but actually able to access objective marketplace truth. Ensuring your team can make decisions based on accurate data instead of skewed information will lead your company to make the best possible decisions.
Verifying your global SEO and ad campaign results
Another relevant and relative case study for using a proxy network to carry out market research is when running high-value ad campaigns. Often, an advertiser can be charged for adverts that you never see. You have to trust the results shown in your business campaign management dashboard. By viewing through a proxy server, you can verify that your ad is actually serving in the correct region.
This can be crucial when you are running a global ad campaign for a client, as you want to ensure that your brand’s ad is displaying online in the heart of Paris, and not just back at your office in the wrong location entirely. This is equally important when it comes to running an SEO campaign far from the true location of your work computer.
If one of your clients is heavily reliant on “local” SEO results, for example displaying amongst its competitors on Google Maps, it is essential that you can view the map or a general search query in the same way that the locals in the neighborhood do, too. If you aren’t using a proxy, or they aren’t positioned correctly, it is impossible to verify yourself if your local SEO work is actually moving the needle in the target city.
By using a proxy network, you can hold service providers and marketing platforms accountable for the performance that they’re detailing in your campaign dashboard, and reassure yourself that you can back up the claims you make to your client when they ask you directly.
Choosing the right proxy for your research task
Now, it is one thing to decide that you should use a proxy network to complete your task, but another thing entirely to find the best proxy service for your requirements. For market research tasks, most businesses regard a residential proxy as the gold standard. This is because they originate from home internet providers and reflect what the average consumer views when searching the internet. It is almost impossible for a website to distinguish your proxy access from a real shopper.
You should also ensure that your proxy provider has a global reach. If you’re a business that relies on providing market research for your clients, internally or externally, sooner rather than later, you’re going to need an exit node somewhere outside of your country. Researching the UK market is impossible without a proxy service based in one of its major cities. Using residential IP pools is also far less likely for your campaign to become flagged for bot activity, meaning that your research will almost always remain uninterrupted.
Ensure your business intelligence is actually intelligent
As you have learned, market research is only as good or as accurate as the data you can collect. A proxy network goes far beyond just scraping the data, but actually ensuring the information you collect is impartial and unfiltered.
Business intelligence is becoming one of the most prominent ways that you can ensure your company stands out amongst your competitors, so don’t let your research suffer from localized biases, algorithmic pricing strategies, or misleading inventory reports. Use a professional proxy setup to see a website for the first time, every time. You can find a research-grade proxy solution at BestProxy.net.
