For the uninitiated, the idea of collecting data can be a minefield, but in modern-day digital marketing, it has become an essential way of ensuring you are at the forefront of your niche and able to compete with your competitors. Many factors involve data collection: your competitor’s prices, SEO and SERP tracking, and even market expansion.
So that your business can collect data efficiently and accurately, nowadays it is highly recommended to use a proxy server and run automations from a different access point to your business’s actual IP address. This is for several reasons, one of which is that a competitor could move to block your IP address if they work out who you are, and another is that to keep track of pricing strategies, you’d need to access the website multiple tmes in a day, which could trigger a temporary block on access against your IP address.
In this article, we’ll look to cover all the bases, including the legal aspects, so that you can make an informed choice for your digital marketing team.
What is a proxy and what does it do?
Firstly, a quick overview of proxies themselves. A proxy server is an intermediary computer service that acts as a middleman, or a gateway, between your device and the internet. This means that when you connect to a website, you instead connect via the proxy server, and the website you access will see that specific server as your connection point rather than your actual device.
By doing this, it not only masks your IP address but can also provide you with added security and firewall aspects, as well as web filtering. For example, you may find large educational establishments use a proxy server for the many devices in-house, which allows the institution’s IT team to set up filtering on the websites you can access, whilst also leaning on the server’s built-in firewall software to protect all its users.
The legality of using a proxy server
Using proxies to collect data for your company is legal, provided that the data you are trying to collect is publicly available and that you are not violating either the privacy of users or the terms of service of the website in question. Therefore, it goes without saying that proxies should never be used to hack into another website or collect private data from other individual users.
Choosing the best proxy server for your business means selecting a provider that can offer you a wide range of locations, including at least one in the country for which your business is based, so that you can always access the data you need to make your business run as efficiently as possible.
SEO and SERP tracking automations benefit from proxy access
A key use of a proxy server for data collection is to monitor your SEO (search engine optimization) terms and track SERPs (search engine results pages). You may know that big search engines, such as Google, can present different results based on the territory you search from. This means that for an international business, it can be very difficult to assess how it ranks for its key search terms worldwide.
Making sure that you always have the latest data on your search terms across the world allows your digital marketing team to react to any changes (both positive and negative) quickly and also guides them on what their best next steps are to make your business even more visible. The best proxy for this purpose is to select a provider that can offer you all your locations from one account. This makes managing the automations much easier, given that you can simply switch the location required for each round of data collection.
Proxies are essential for competitor intelligence
Another key use for a proxy server is to have the most up-to-date information on your competitors’ products and pricing. Your digital marketing team will thank you for providing a proxy for them to be able to automate the information gathering on a daily basis, especially if you need to monitor your competitors internationally as well.
Often, a competitor can work out who you are by the number of accesses from a locale that matches your head office. If this happens, they can block your company’s IP address and stop anyone in your business from accessing anything they’re doing. By accessing through a proxy, you anonymise the location from which your employees access competitors.
This is especially important when monitoring new product launches or perhaps dynamic pricing and promotional strategies. The best proxy for this type of monitoring is one based within your own country, but in a different city from where you are based.
A proxy gets you around geo-targeting
A final strong positive to running a proxy server is when you’re beginning to consider market expansion. A very common tactic used in modern digital marketing is for a company to show a different website in every country from which they operate. This is called geo-targeting and means they show only the products, information, and services available to each country, including the prices they’re offering.
For your marketing team to be able to plan successfully, they will need to use a proxy server to access the competitors from the country in which you wish to expand. This way, they can accurately collect data on the products/services and prices that your key competitors offer, and ensure that your business can compete from the outset. Similarly to the SEO monitoring, the best proxy for this instance is one that can offer a range of countries, including all those that you feasibly want to expand into, so that you can manage all your connections from one account
Select a proxy company with multiple access points
As you have learned, giving your digital marketing team access to a proxy service can suitably enhance their data collection abilities and make your business more efficient and more effective. By anonymising your access point, your competitors will never be able to track each access that your employees make to their platforms – and even if they did, you would be able to change the access point very quickly with one of the best proxy providers.
In this sense, selecting a company that offers you a wide range of cities and countries, as well as fast customer service support, for when you run into connection issues or need to alter your servers, is the most logical approach.