Firstly, a proxy is an intermediary that allows you to connect to your destination site using its IP address. It protects you from hackers and people wanting to steal your data. When you send a request, it travels via the proxy before getting to its final destination. It will mask your IP address to keep your web data protected.
Types of proxies:
Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxies are proxies that come from a secondary corporation and have no connection with Internet Service Providers. One of its benefits is that they provide you with private IP authentication.
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies are IP addresses coming from ISP to homeowners. The IP address has a connection with a physical location. Therefore, you’ll have an entirely new IP whenever you move to a new place provided by your ISP.
Data Extraction Techniques
Proxies play a critical role in any web scraping operation, and you will need a vast amount of them to scrape data successfully. When proxies keep you out of the public eye, every request appears to be from a customer so that you can scrape without a hitch.
You can scrape data using your in-house team or a third-party scraper. This decision might depend on certain factors.
Let’s take a look at the two techniques of data extraction, to make it easier for you to reach a conclusion on which is better for your business.
In-house
Using your in-house team to build a scraper requires resources — both in web servers and other infrastructures. There would not be an interruption of the data extracted. However, the complexity involved in this technique is a big task. You’ll not only have to maintain web scrapers yourself but also use your skills, budget, and lean on your developers.
Outsourcing your Scraping Project
If you choose to have someone else build the web scraper for you, the only thing you need to do is to pay for the service. Therefore, you’d be saving cost as there are no maintenance charges; all you need to do is pay and use the scraper.
The decision to build a scraper or outsource the service depends on your budget. Evaluate your business situation and ascertain, which option makes more economic sense.
Proxy use Cases:
Ad Verification
When your advertising campaigns start paying off, you’ll want to scale up. But that is not cheap in any way. If you’re going to increase profitability, a proper plan will have to be in place.
Therefore, you have to keep advertising fraud in mind. Ads frauds are of different types, and so many businesses are on the receiving end. When an ad impression falls on a fraudster website, rather than the target site, money goes down the drain. That’s where proxies come to the rescue, as it allows for companies to check advertisers’ pages anonymously, double-checking whether the ad is displayed on the correct website and format.
Brand Protection
Building a brand is not an easy task. Businesses must do all within their capacity to protect their brands and keep their market share.
For instance, companies use residential proxies to crawl e-commerce sites, auction websites, and other essential marketplaces. With this approach, businesses can detect fraudsters and take the necessary steps to protect their brand.
SEO Monitoring
Hiring SEO service providers can be an expensive venture. However, there are several tools that make your SEO usage easier. Some vendors will even sell you “do it yourself” SEO tools that you can test. Such tools will help you automate your search engine research and also gather the data that you need.
Proxies make all of these tools work perfectly well as they help you scale your SEO operations.
When you carry out SEO research about your competitors, you put your energy on a lot of details or questions. Do their sites have a higher ranking than yours? Do they have a link on their website which redirects visitors to another page? Answering these questions can help you while monitoring your competitors on the SERPs with proxies’ IP addresses from various geo-locations.
Travel Aggregators Rely on Proxies
In this day and age, you can plan your trip with the best-given option. But how a travel aggregator pulls so much information from a website?
Well, for businesses such as this, they’ll scrape flight prices, car rental offers, hotel listing, and several others, from time to time from the web. They do this successfully using a proxy — with web scraping tools. Proxies with a vast amount of IPs allow scraping data with ease as each request appears to be coming from an organic internet user.
Data is of critical importance. As a business, you need to get ahead. If you need to scrape it off your competitors’ site, then proxies are an ideal solution. Get competitive; use data extraction to be a force to be reckoned with and outsmart your competition.
