How to use proxies and web scraping for market research

High-quality market research drives business success. An unprecedented amount of valuable market data is now available across the internet, but it’s not simple to gather and analyze. Websites implement rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and geo-restrictions that block scrapers and skew data collection.

In this article, we’ll cover the top proxy use cases for overcoming these challenges, helping you optimize your market research efforts.

Understanding the role of proxies in market research

Proxies act as intermediaries between your device and the websites you want to access. When a request is routed through a proxy, it hides your IP address and replaces it with the proxy server's IP.

To the target website, it appears as if the request came from the proxy server, not your machine. This simple mechanism allows you to route traffic through multiple IPs and regions, creating a layer of anonymity and control over how and where your data requests appear to originate.

In the context of market research, this functionality is incredibly valuable. Many websites implement rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and automated bot detection systems that block or throttle repeated requests from the same IP.

By using a rotating proxy network, developers can distribute their requests across a large pool of IP addresses, making it much harder for websites to detect and block scraping activity. This ensures continuity and scale — two things every data-driven research operation needs.

Why do you need to use proxies for market research?

The demand for accurate, real-time online data is central to competitive strategy. Businesses rely on this data to understand shifting consumer behavior, benchmark competitors, and stay ahead of market trends.

For developers supporting these insights through automated tools, the challenge lies in accessing that data consistently and at scale.

The growing demand for web-based insights

Online data fuels nearly every aspect of modern market research. Companies track prices, monitor customer reviews, evaluate brand perception, analyze product listings, and follow competitors across regions.

Manually collecting this data is slow and prone to errors — automation is the only way to keep up.

However, automation runs into friction almost immediately. Most modern websites use bot protection systems that detect repetitive access patterns, block IPs, and serve CAPTCHAs to anything that looks suspicious.

Without the right infrastructure, scrapers fail to deliver the data businesses depend on.

Proxies unlock access to blocked or restricted data

Proxies solve these challenges by giving you a flexible, distributed network of IP addresses. This helps in several ways:

• First, by rotating IPs between requests, you avoid getting blocked by rate limits or anti-bot rules.
• Second, you can access content from different geographic regions. If a site restricts content to users in the US or shows different pricing in Europe, a proxy based in that region gives you direct access.

This level of access is critical for competitive analysis, regional pricing strategies, and localized user experience research. Without proxies, your tools would either miss important data or present an incomplete picture of the market.

Proxies make large-scale data collection sustainable

As your scraping needs grow, proxies become even more important. Large-scale data gathering requires you to send hundreds or thousands of requests per hour—something most websites won’t allow from a single IP.

Proxies help distribute this load across a wide pool of addresses, making your scraper faster and far more resilient.

They also reduce the maintenance overhead for developers. Instead of spending hours building CAPTCHA solvers or manually handling IP bans, you can rely on a robust proxy setup to handle those issues automatically.

This lets you focus on extracting insights instead of putting out fires.

Ethical considerations and compliance

No matter how smoothly your large scale data extraction project is running, if it involves ethical and compliance problems, it could get shut down.

That’s why you want to make sure any proxies or web scraping tools you use are fully compliant and ethical. Keep that in mind as you decide which proxy service and web scraping tools are the best fit for your project.

Top 7 use cases for proxies and web scraping for market research

1. Competitive analysis

Staying ahead of competitors requires ongoing visibility into their digital presence. From pricing strategies to product launches and customer feedback, the data available on competitor websites holds valuable insights — but accessing it at scale isn’t always straightforward.

Many sites implement geo-blocking, rate limiting, or bot detection to prevent automated monitoring. With proxies, you can bypass these restrictions and gather competitor data anonymously.

For example, a SaaS company might monitor how competitors tweak their pricing tiers or feature sets in different markets. By rotating IPs and targeting different locations, the company can avoid detection and collect clean, localized data that reflects what actual users see.

SOAX makes this process smooth and reliable. Our pool of residential and mobile IPs— available in over 195 countries — helps ensure that requests originate from real, trusted locations.

2. Price monitoring

By scraping pricing data from competitors, marketplaces, and retailers, companies can track price fluctuations in real time and optimize their own pricing strategies accordingly.

For example, a consumer electronics brand might use proxies to scrape competitors’ product prices in the Netherlands. By comparing prices across these markets, the company can adjust its prices dynamically or monitor whether competitors offer promotions or discounts. This allows them to stay competitive and adapt to market conditions.

Without proxies, repetitive requests from the same IP can trigger rate limiting, CAPTCHA challenges, or blocks, disrupting the process.

To track prices effectively, you can set up a scraper using SOAX’s rotating residential proxies to regularly fetch pricing data from various online platforms like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.

You can specify regions to scrape localized prices and gather competitive intelligence. By rotating IPs across multiple regions and times, you avoid detection and ensure access to accurate, up-to-date data.

3. Brand monitoring

Proxies are invaluable for businesses that want to track how their brand is perceived online. From social media platforms and review sites to forums and blogs, there’s a wealth of data that can provide insights into consumer sentiment, trends, and potential issues.

A beauty brand, for example, could track customer sentiment by scraping reviews of its products on ecommerce platforms, pulling social media mentions, and monitoring user-generated content in beauty forums.

Using proxies, you can view discussions from different countries and demographic groups. This lets you identify regional variations in brand perception, common complaints, and emerging trends.

SOAX’s large pool of residential and mobile proxies allows you to target specific countries or cities, ensuring access to geo-restricted content.

4. Market trend analysis

Staying ahead of emerging market trends is valuable for businesses aiming to capitalize on new opportunities. Proxies play a vital role in gathering data from a wide range of online sources— such as news articles, industry reports, blogs, and social media platforms— allowing businesses to identify shifts in consumer behavior and spot trends across different regions.

For example, a global ecommerce platform could use proxies to scrape social media mentions and product reviews across different regions like the US, China, and the EU. This lets them identify trends early and strategically adjust product offerings, marketing strategies, and inventory management.

SOAX’s proxy network is particularly useful for market trend analysis. With geotargeted IPs available in hundreds of locations, you can capture data from a specific region or demographic.

5. Ad verification

Proxies are an essential tool for ad verification, enabling businesses to check whether their ads are being placed in the right regions and targeting the correct demographics.

To verify ad placements, companies use proxies to access their ads from multiple geographical locations.

For example, a digital marketing agency might use SOAX’s rotating proxies to test different ad placements across various countries and devices.

Using proxies, you can view the ad placements in those specific regions to make sure that they appear as intended. This includes checking if the correct creatives, landing pages, and calls to action are shown to different user segments.

6. SEO monitoring

Using proxies, you can simulate searches, cities, or even specific devices. This provides insights into keyword rankings across regions, competitor performance, and visibility in local search results.

For example, a global travel agency might want to check how its website ranks for keywords like "best hotels in Paris" across multiple regions. By using proxies from SOAX, the agency can simulate searches from the US, UK, and France to see how their rankings vary across countries and tailor their SEO strategies accordingly.

Also, by rotating IPs across various regions, you can gather a wide range of data. A wider range of data helps ensure that your findings aren’t skewed by personalized or localized search results which might differ from the general public’s experience.

7. Accessing geo-restricted data

Many online platforms restrict access to certain content based on geographical location, making it difficult for businesses to gather market data from specific regions.

For example, a market researcher based in the US might need to scrape data on e-commerce product listings, reviews, or competitor pricing from a region where the content is geo-restricted, like China or Brazil.

Proxies are a powerful tool for overcoming these geo-restrictions, allowing researchers to access data that would otherwise be unavailable. By masking your real IP address and routing traffic through servers located in different countries, you can bypass regional blocks and gather the information your business needs.

By using SOAX proxies located in specific countries, you can access localized pricing data, track competitor products, and monitor how products are being received by customers in different regions. This type of regional insight is essential for making data-driven decisions about international marketing strategies and adjusting product offerings based on local demand.

Choosing the right proxies for market research

When conducting market research, selecting the right type of proxy is essential for efficient and reliable data gathering. There are several types of proxies— residential, datacenter, and mobile— each with its own set of advantages depending on your specific research needs.

• Residential proxies are IP addresses assigned by ISPs to homeowners, making them ideal for tasks that need to mimic real user behavior, such as scraping social media, accessing geo-restricted content, or gathering data from sites with strict anti-bot protections. Since residential proxies are harder to detect and block, they’re perfect for large-scale, long-term data collection across multiple regions.
• Datacenter proxies are IPs provided by data centers and are typically faster and more affordable than residential proxies. However, they’re more likely to be flagged as bots by websites. Datacenter proxies are best for tasks that don’t need to bypass strong anti-bot systems or where speed is more important than avoiding detection, such as for SEO monitoring or price tracking on websites.
• Mobile proxies are similar to residential proxies but are tied to mobile devices. They’re harder to detect due to their association with real mobile carriers. These proxies are ideal for scraping mobile-specific data, such as app performance or mobile website content.

When choosing a proxy provider, factors like proxy pool size, speed, reliability, and ethical sourcing are important.

SOAX’s large proxy pool allows for diverse IPs across multiple locations, minimizing the chances of getting blocked or flagged. Its speed and reliability are key for maintaining uninterrupted data scraping, especially when scraping large volumes of data. SOAX’s ethical sourcing ensures that the proxies being used are legally and responsibly acquired, which is critical for maintaining compliance and ethical standards in data collection.

Best practices for using proxies in market research

Ethical data collection

When conducting market research using proxies, respect the terms of service (ToS) of the websites being scraped. Violating a website’s ToS can lead to penalties, such as IP bans, legal actions, or damaging relationships with the website owner.

To maintain ethical standards, avoid using proxies to flood a website with excessive requests or scrape sensitive personal data. Instead, focus on gathering publicly available information, such as product pricing, reviews, or market trends.

Always stay up to date with any legal regulations or privacy laws relevant to the jurisdictions you’re working in, ensuring that your market research activities comply with local rules and regulations.

Proxy rotation and management

One of the key reasons to use proxies in market research is to avoid detection and blocking by websites. However, simply using proxies isn’t enough; proper proxy rotation is necessary to ensure smooth, uninterrupted data scraping.

When too many requests come from the same IP, websites are likely to flag that IP as a bot and block access.

To prevent this, rotating proxies regularly is a must. This ensures that each request appears to come from a unique IP address, mimicking real user behavior. A proxy provider like SOAX offers rotating IPs, which can be set up to switch automatically between a pool of IPs, thereby minimizing the risk of detection.

Managing proxies efficiently can prevent downtime or IP exhaustion.

Regularly check the health of your proxies and make sure they’re delivering the right performance— reliable and fast connections are key for large-scale data scraping.

Data quality and validation

Collecting data through proxies can sometimes result in discrepancies or inaccuracies, especially if the proxies aren’t properly managed. It’s important to validate the data collected through proxies to make sure that it’s accurate and reliable. Validate data by cross-referencing information from different sources or by comparing it against known benchmarks.

For example, when gathering competitor pricing data from e-commerce websites using proxies, verify the prices manually or through another method to make sure that the data is correct.

This is especially important for businesses relying on scraped data for decision-making, as inaccurate information can lead to poor strategic choices.

Also, monitor for any signs of data pollution, such as missing information, unusual formatting, or inconsistencies across different regions.

Use proxies to get high-quality, actionable data, not just large volumes of data.

Conclusion

Proxies are an invaluable tool for businesses conducting market research. From competitive analysis and price monitoring to ad verification and SEO monitoring, proxies provide the flexibility and reliability needed to access critical market data across a wide range of industries.

By using proxies, businesses can gain deeper insights into their target markets, understand customer behavior, optimize strategies, and stay ahead of competitors.

With the right proxy solution, companies can scale their data collection efforts, avoid detection, and ensure high-quality, accurate information.

For businesses looking to elevate their market research efforts, the next step toward making informed, data-driven decisions is to explore SOAX’s proxy solutions.