The Best Proxy for Market Research

Proxies for market research collects data from multiple sources to keep abreast of the minute changes in the market. Market researchers leverage the data the internet produces to gain a competitive advantage.  A proxy is a requirement to get past geo-restrictions, IP blocks, and CAPTCHAs to access the data. Market researchers use proxies to gather

Proxies for market research collects data from multiple sources to keep abreast of the minute changes in the market. Market researchers leverage the data the internet produces to gain a competitive advantage. 

A proxy is a requirement to get past geo-restrictions, IP blocks, and CAPTCHAs to access the data. Market researchers use proxies to gather information about the market and about your business. It gives them an insight into how your target customers perceive your business. Market research can also help you to stack up against the competitors and plan your next move. 

What is Market Research?

Market research plays an important role in the process of developing your products and services. It brings the products to the marketplace and markets them to your customers by giving an accurate vision of your market, and how customers perceive you in comparison with your competitors and evaluate your competitor’s strategies.

The market research also helps you identify the customers who are most likely to do business with you. It gives you an opportunity to know your customer’s preferences and reveals how your customers and prospects view your existing business and products.  

Market research gives you a vision about deciding whether a new idea for your business will work or not and helps you find reviews about similar products and their performance in the market which guides you to make effective marketing strategies. Market research is the key component of business development as it provides fact-based research for estimating sales and profitability. 

Why Proxy for Market Research?

Conventional market research methods are time-consuming and expensive. These include surveys, focus groups, personal interviews, observation, and field trials. Web scraping data provides market trend analysis, pricing analysis, R&D, and competitor monitoring to ensure that the business has an edge in the market.

Marketing and Sales

The scraped data from the competitor’s website enables the businesses to generate leads, analyze people’s interests, and extract ratings from various platforms for monitoring consumer sentiment.

Insights into a particular market require a great deal of data and web scraping provides this data with reliability and accuracy. 

Market Price Monitoring

Online business continues to replace the traditional methods of business because the latest technologies help businesses reach their markets from a wider perspective. 

Globalization makes products and services change in price variations based on their location. Due to geolocation restrictions, the websites are inaccessible, making it impossible to know the price in that location.

However, when you use a proxy with that location’s IP, you can access those websites without any restrictions. You can scrape the prices and compare them with the competitor’s website which is crucial in marketing as you need a price that is not too high or too low to negatively affect your marketing efforts. 

Brand Monitoring

This is one of the most important business analytics processes to monitor different channels of the internet or on the social media websites where your brand presents itself. These insights help you understand your customers’ demographics, intent, sentiment, likes, and dislikes.

Brand monitoring is not just about customer reviews and feedback as it also protects your brand from illegal users. There is a risk that someone might copy your ideas and create duplicate products and services so you must search the internet for counterfeits and track false propaganda that hampers the reputation of your company.

Proxies help your business monitor and scan websites worldwide without geographical restrictions or a firewall blocking your access.

Competitor Analysis

Market researchers provide a useful solution by integrating scraped data into a systematic competitor monitoring process. This information maximizes revenue, market share, and growth opportunities which realizes the power of web scraped data to its fullest potential.

Access Geo-restricted Content

It’s crucial to monitor web pages in different countries to detect a malicious user who might sell counterfeit products and services worldwide using your brand name. Some websites might restrict access based on your location and your risk of those websites blocking you increases. Proxies help you to access geo-restricted content.

Avoid IP Ban

When you use proxies for market research, they have a risk of getting banned because the same IP is used for scraping. Rotating proxies prevent getting IP banned by providing full access to its pool of IP addresses that change periodically and it assigns new IP addresses to the proxies at regular intervals. This makes it hard for the websites to detect the scraping proxies and protects you from IP address blocking or IP banning.

The network service provider blocks the frequently used IP addresses or the subnet when the proxy spends too much time scraping a website.

User’s Review Monitoring

Customers share their reviews on social media which are critical to building a better business. Most new users consider product reviews about a product or service before deciding to purchase them. Such reviews are important to plan your business strategy, deliver solutions to cater to the user’s needs, and help in sales and marketing.

Proxies help you monitor the social media channel to collect user reviews that facilitate you to retain your brand’s reputation.

Types of Proxies

Market research needs proxies for web Scraping as it is an automated and anonymous process. There are two types of proxies available in the market, residential and datacenter, and you must choose the one that supports your purpose.

Residential Proxy

A residential proxy masks the original IP address and assigns a new IP address with every request from the user. A residential proxy is an intermediate proxy server that provides traceable IP addresses to a location in a network. 

The internet service provider (ISP) registers the IP addresses of all the devices connected to that subnet in a public database. The database contains information about the browser and the cookies of the devices connected through the ISP.

Datacenter Proxy

Datacenter proxies do not attach to an ISP and are offered by a different service provider or a cloud provider. These proxies offer fast connections and support high bandwidth. 

Datacenter proxies have a large pool of shared proxies. The datacenter proxy masks or hides the IP address of the user by forwarding a scraping request from the user to the target website through a proxy server. 

These proxies provide anonymity so the target website doesn’t block them. Datacenter proxies provide IP address authentication where only authenticated users may access the proxies during a specific period.

Datacenter proxies change the location virtually for the user to access content from any country that restricts them if they are from a different geographical location.

Datacenter proxies offer hundreds of subnets to ensure that the website won’t block or cloak you. A user gets a huge pool of proxy IPs from each subnet to scrape the website without it blocking them.

How Does a Residential Proxy Work?

The residential proxy has two categories based on how long it holds on to the IP address:

• Static residential proxy.
• Rotating residential proxy.

The static residential proxy allows you to use an IP address for a short duration. You can set the timing for how long you wish to use the same proxy IP. The static residential proxy allows you to use the same proxy IP until the end of the session.

Rotating residential proxies make use of rotating IPs to allot a new IP address from the pool of IPs for every new request from a user. The websites have a hard time detecting or blocking the proxy as it changes the IP address frequently. Rotating residential proxies are best when you use proxies to scrape the website and wish to remain anonymous and unblocked.

The ISP has a pool of IP addresses and it provides a new IP address when a proxy makes a new connection between the user and the server. It distributes the next available IP address for the proxy to scrape the website. When a user disconnects, it takes the IP address and puts it back in the pool.

A sticky session will maintain the proxy with the same IP address until the end of the scraping session. The user can also set how often they want IP addresses to rotate or if it must use the same IP address with a sticky session or sticky IP until you complete a task. 

How does a Datacenter Proxy work?

The datacenter proxies are not attached to any ISP provider and their IP addresses are hard to find. The proxies are from data centers or cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud.

Since they are private proxies, they ensure little to no IP blacklisting. Websites use blacklists to block the IP addresses of an individual or a subnet to filter out illegitimate or malicious IP addresses from accessing their websites. Websites that maintain these lists are with firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and other traffic filtering tools that block any requests that come from the listed IP addresses.

Residential Proxy Vs Datacenter Proxy

Web scrapers uses either residential or datacenter proxy based on the requirements of the user. Residential proxy is better as the probability of getting blocked is much less than the other. You can choose any type of proxy based on the requirements, price, and the time you require for scraping activity. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is an SEO proxy?

SEO proxies act as a bridge between your computer and the website you are browsing. They remove any personalization that would influence the results when you see how your website ranks. This information helps to determine why some websites rank while others don’t.

2. What are monitoring proxies?

SEO monitoring

This is the process of monitoring your website to track its visibility, rankings, and general brand strength. It allows companies to track the results and progress in search engine result page(SERP) rankings. 

Price monitoring

The scraped data gives timely access to a reliable source of high-quality data that helps you make profitable pricing decisions to increase revenue. Web scraping helps businesses to extract competitors’ prices in addition to monitoring their new product releases, discounts, and other competitive product information.

Traffic monitoring

Proxies implemented at the server-side can monitor traffic such as connection requests and connection statistics.

3. What is a dedicated proxy?

A dedicated proxy is also a private proxy that offers privacy but it has a higher price compared to shared proxies. Unlike a shared proxy, only one user can access a private proxy’s IP address to access the server at a given time. The dedicated proxy server provides a mask for the user’s original IP address and then connects them to the targeted server.

Closing Thoughts

Proxies for market research helps to identify the market demands and understand their competitor. Market prices fluctuate and the customer’s perspective and expectations vary continuously. Market research is indispensable as market analysis will not be accurate without reliable data, making web scraping the best-secured means to retrieve data for such analysis.

ProxyScrape provides a variety of proxies with unlimited bandwidth and 99% uptime. They have a flexible combination of proxies to choose from and the pricing is also affordable. Keep checking our blog for more information on the newly introduced proxies, their uses, and the benefits ProxyScrape offers.