Many companies now need to employ web scraping and data collection strategies as part of their digital marketing plans. This is because the global pricing marketplace is becoming more fluid than ever before, with prices being altered at the drop of a hat for a multitude of reasons. Whether a company is setting a specific price in a specific city to tie-in to a real-world promotional campaign, or whether a company wants to capitalize on the exact day where their competitor ends its own discount sale, it is becoming an essential segment of a digital marketing team’s workload.
For a digital marketing team to be assured of 100% uptime in their data collection requirements, it is very likely that they will need to use a number of proxy server access points. This is because they may face IP bans due to accessing a website too frequently, or perhaps they have not been banned but instead reached the rate limit for the number of times the webpage can be served to their IP address that day. There is also a consideration that some companies will want to assess the prices that their competitors are setting overseas, information that you cannot ordinarily see due to a geo-blocking issue. As you can select whichever city or country you want for a proxy server, it becomes the obvious solution for all these potential issues.
Bypass potential IP bans by using proxies for web scraping activities
When setting up a proxy server for your business, you will be offered the choice between using a static IP or one that rotates at a set frequency. A static IP is great when you want to guarantee a consistent connection, i.e., you know exactly what to expect every time you connect with it. However, this does leave you to run the risk of an IP ban, in the same way that your own business’s IP address could be banned by a competitor if they work out who you are and why you’re accessing their website so frequently.
As an IP ban can be incredibly frustrating, particularly if it stops any automated data scraping routines that have been set up, it can be a sensible decision to choose instead to run your proxy server system with a rotating IP address. You will be able to decide how often your IP address changes, which effectively alters the point you connect to the internet from, depending on how frequently you might want to be accessing certain competitors’ websites for your data collection needs.
You will know you’ve been IP-banned when you are served a 403 error message on your competitor’s website, or if it simply does not connect. Often, this is justified because the number of connections you’ve tried to make from an IP address breaks the terms of service. However, if what you’re encountering is an extremely slow-loading website, rather than meeting a blockage, you have probably started to reach its rate limit.
Avoid rate limits imposed by your competitors’ websites
To avoid getting locked out of a website, even temporarily, you can ensure that you access it through a proxy server that is set up to rotate the IP address it accesses from. Essentially, this means that you won’t ever hit a rate limit block, which is often set at fewer than 100 attempts to access in a minute. You might be aware of something called a DDoS attack, which is when a website is deliberately overloaded with multiple unique loads in a certain time frame, overwhelming a server’s capacity to function and serve the website.
By rotating your IP address, you can continue to access web addresses multiple times to ensure that your real-time data is always up to date and accurate, and you can also make certain that your own web scraping strategy does not appear to be an aggressive overloading attack on the competitor’s server. As rate limiting is only ever a temporary solution, your proxy server can reuse a previous IP address at a later stage of the day, or on another day, meaning you don’t need to invest in more proxy server access points.
With BestProxy, you can choose from over 60 different cities in the United States, as well as from over 100 countries around the world, guaranteeing you the best speed and stability of connection to ensure that your web scraping and data collection requirements are always met.
Evade geo-blocking restrictions by using a proxy
One final difficulty that digital marketers face when trying to set up routines and systems that allow them to have access to up-to-date information on their competitors is accessing foreign iterations of their competitors’ websites. Nowadays, it is incredibly common for businesses to have an individualistic approach to pricing, creating a separate offer for each region in which they operate. However, as part of this pricing approach, you can find your access to alternative regions geo-blocked, either due to legal or licensing requirements.
So what’s the best way to understand the offer that your competitor is currently serving across the globe? You should have a proxy server set up for each specific territory that you wish to offer your product in, or you wish to assess the competition in. A simple reason is that because there are substantial differences in the business laws across the world, a business may have to geolock their website to only serve the legally correct information in the territory from which you access it, meaning you might be unable to access the current EU pricing if you are based in the USA.
By having a proxy server set up for each region or territory that you want to track, you can also ensure that your data collection or web scraping tools are also able to access accurate information; this is because, although your routines are setup to be automated, the IP address that you are scraping from must match the market you wish to collect information from.
Using BestProxy will help your business achieve its web scraping goals
As you can see, the key to having a solid strategy for your digital marketing team to operate a pricing campaign on is using a proxy server relative to the markets you wish to monitor. Whilst this market is ever-growing, you will be best placed by finding a cost-effective but consistent proxy server provider.
BestProxy offers competitive setup and maintenance costs, but prides itself on its connection speeds and the variety of locations it can offer you to connect from, as well as its instant access policy, meaning that the moment you pay for the service, it will be ready and waiting for you to use.
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