Proxies are special servers that work as frontman for your internet activities. Instead of you accessing internet content directly, you tell the proxy what it is you want to get, and it gets it for you. The websites you access only communicate with the proxy server, so they have no idea that it's really you who's making the requests. Two of the main reasons you would want this extra layer between you and the internet are: preserving anonymity when browsing online and circumventing web access restrictions.

Proxies are useful for so much more than simple anonymization for casual users. Businesses are utilizing proxies in creative ways, from boosting the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns to enhancing their overall productivity. Many industries, like travel aggregators, base their entire model around the use of proxies. Let's look at some cases where businesses rely on the extensive use of proxies for their everyday activities.

SEO monitoring

SEO monitoring is a vital part of building the online presence of a business. It's important to know how your business ranks in search results not only in your own country but in other relevant markets around the globe. To get an understanding of how brand's or product's SEO is performing in other regions, businesses use proxies to make it appear as if they're connecting from that region. For example, if you wanted to know how your fashion brand's blog posts rank in Italy, you could connect to a server located in Italy. Google and other search engines will think you're actually in Italy, and the results will show you what a local Italian might see. You could then make adjustments to improve your SEO rankings in Italy based on these results.

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Travel fare aggregation

Travel fare aggregators are based entirely around collecting travel fare and hotel pricing data from multiple sources on the internet. This is a tedious and time-consuming task that would eat up staff-hours if performed manually, so these businesses use special tools that automate the process for them. With these tools, a business can gather data from dozens, even hundreds of websites in no time at all. However, most websites don't like it when people try to grab their data at high volumes, and they will restrict or outright block any IP that is sending too many simultaneous connections. These businesses use proxies to get around this issue. By assigning a proxy address for each data collector, the website they're grabbing data from has no idea they're all coming from the same location, and the collectors' work goes on unhindered.

Encouraging and directing conversation around a brand or product

Modern marketing is mostly digital and centers around the effective use of social media to build buzz and start discussions about a brand or product. One of the best techniques to do this is through the use of multiple social media accounts. By managing multiple social media accounts, businesses can influence the flow of discussion about their brand by directing these accounts to like specific posts, write comments, or share brand-related writings on social media. With social bots, a business can have hundreds of unique accounts doing this work simultaneously. Social media platforms usually have special mechanisms in place that detect and prevent the creation of multiple accounts from a single location, so businesses use proxies to get around these restrictions.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the extraction of subjective information about a topic. In relation to business, it's about finding out peoples' sentiment - how they feel - towards a brand or product. Companies need to know this so they can understand how their audience is responding to a product or brand and make the necessary corrections. This is done through the use of automated tools that scour community forums, Facebook discussions, blog posts - anywhere people are talking about their product - and collect relevant sentimental data. To do this, they need tons of bots exploring thousands of websites at once, scanning and extracting the very specific information they're looking for. However, most websites don't like the bandwidth these bots eat up and can detect and block multiple simultaneous connections that appear to come from a single address. Businesses use proxies, so their bots all seem to be accessing the web from separate locations, hiding the fact that they all belong to the same company.

Conclusion

Web proxies offer so much more than the ability to hide your identity from the internet. We've laid out some examples of how businesses are using the power of proxies to increase productivity, enhance their marketing campaigns, and boost their bottom lines. This is only just a few cases of the usefulness of proxies for businesses; there's a growing variety of use cases for proxies being thought up and demonstrated all the time.

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