The internet is a world full of possibilities and opportunities for anyone who wants to scale a business virtually. However, business owners can run into limitations from time to time that inhibits growth potential. One helpful resource that entrepreneurs and online professionals should explore is the functions and benefits of residential proxies.
Residential Proxies for Your Business
In a nutshell, residential proxies are carefully selected and whitelisted residential IPs for business or personal use leased out by internet service providers. These are often used to scrape the web for deals, information, and virtually any form of data that can often have geographical limitations. Residential IPs for business are paired up with a tangible device that allows one to be recognized as a real user and not a spam bot but takes out geo-tagging blocks.
A good example of a residential proxy’s usage would be to access a location-specific airplane ticket deal only available to Croatian residents. Having a residential proxy enables a user to access that deal no matter where they are in the world. Residential proxies can often serve personal needs, but companies and businesses can benefit greatly from using residential IPs for business. Here are some tips and use scenarios where businesses can benefit from a residential proxy.
1. Improve Security
Most companies use data center proxies, which are very much like residential proxies, except that they are shared amongst many users, making it easy to trace back to the intermediary traffic source. This can often lead to security implications. When using a private residential proxy in place of a datacenter proxy, businesses can scour the internet for information without the fear of getting information stolen.
Residential proxies provide more security, reliability, and anonymity than shared datacenter proxies offered by third-party companies. They protect an individual or company from receiving the brunt of privacy abuse by hackers, spammers, and dangerous malware.
2. Save Money on Subscriptions and Deals
Data shows that roughly 90% of smart device apps have geo-tracking capabilities installed on them. While this trend provides many smart and beneficial applications, it also provides a set of inhibitions. Most companies create geo-tagged deals and specials which are available only to select locations. Let’s say, for instance, that a company is in the market for project management software. Some software companies have been known to give more expensive subscription prices in certain locations.
There are two ways that individuals and companies can save money by accessing these services. Some would use a virtual private network or VPN to mask their IP address. Just like residential proxies, VPN services are just as essential for security. But they also allow companies to save on deals.
A VPN can allow a company in a country with higher subscription rates to subscribe at the price point of other cheaper locations without being traced. Another way to achieve the same result is to use a private residential proxy in place of a VPN. Regardless of the options users choose, both can help companies save money on subscriptions and deals.
3. Access Marketing Data, Resources, and Analytics
Another use case scenario where residential proxies come in handy is when collecting marketing data and analytics. Most marketing professionals have been known to use residential proxies to scrape data from platforms like Amazon or other e-commerce platforms that can give them better insights into competitors’ products or user activity. With a residential proxy, marketers avoid getting banned or flagged, given that residential proxies use legitimate IP addresses.
With a residential proxy, marketers also gain access to websites and sub-pages normally inaccessible to their location. Often, virtual teams hire remote teams that might not be able to access a certain site due to location restrictions. Indonesia, for example, blocked websites like Vimeo, Tumblr, and Reddit back in 2018. In China, professionals do not have access to Facebook, which has become a global pool of information and resource for marketers everywhere. Using a residential proxy, marketers from such countries can now access these sites and resources.
4. View campaigns from your audience’s lens
It’s safe to assume that many ad managers and marketers can now operate marketing campaigns outside of their fixed location. Many companies today opt to outsource marketing support to freelancers and agencies in different nations to access better talent or to save on manpower costs.
The only limitation to hiring remote professionals is that they might not be able to view social media advertising or other campaigns from the user’s lens. Some web services can have different appearances in various locations. With residential IPs, marketers can view an ad campaign dynamically from the audience’s perspective. Residential proxies allow marketing teams to verify and check an ad’s appearance and viability from different regions.
5. Create and manage multiple social media accounts
Digital 2020 report determined that over 3.8 Billion people now have social media accounts. With the increasing digital population on social media, it’s only proper that companies take advantage of it, and using residential proxies can help with that process. Most businesses operate multiple social media accounts, but accessing them can be a hassle.
When running multiple accounts on the same IP address, companies face the chances of getting blocked by an internet service provider or having their accounts deleted. Running multiple email accounts and social media accounts also increased the likelihood of messages being thrown into the Spam folder.
On Instagram, users can only accommodate up to five accounts at a time, for instance. But with the use of a residential IP address, social media managers and entrepreneurs can solve all these problems by maintaining complete anonymity online. Proxies can also help social media marketing agencies save time and effort when promoting their clients’ products and services.
6. Enjoy faster speed & save bandwidth
In today’s hyper-connected world, internet speed is an important factor for any business. Experts determined that Amazon would lose £1.6 billion in sales from a one-second delay in a page’s loading time. Internet speed affects an individual and team’s productivity overall. The faster our internet can be, the quicker our teams can get things done.
Data scraping can be taxing on one’s bandwidth. But with static residential proxies, internet speed can drastically improve while caching specific websites. A static residential proxy brings together the white labeling capacities of a residential proxy at a data center proxy’s speed. In other words, it helps with your ISP’s speed while getting the most of your web scraping activities. Saving bandwidth allows professionals to do more and achieve greater results at work, affecting a company’s bottom line immensely in the long run.
Being Everywhere and Nowhere At Once
With the power of a residential proxy, professionals and businesses have the power to be everywhere and nowhere at once. No matter where you are in the world, residential proxies give you the ability to be anywhere you need to be without leaving the comfort of your own home.
Nowadays, there are many residential proxy providers that can give a company or professional the flexibility to geo-target specific countries, regions, or cities and change geo-location settings as needed to save time, energy, and resources. With residential proxies, businesses have the true freedom to globalize and scale no matter how small or lean their teams and operations might be.
