Heard about residential proxies but not sure if your business needs to use them? Keep reading below why you should consider using residential proxies and how it can benefit your company.

Can masking your IP address benefit your business? The answer is, “Yes.” But why? There are a number of benefits to using residential proxies, from allowing you to access blocked content to helping you bypass anti-bot systems that are implemented by search engines and other online services. 

But, before we move forward to how using residential proxies can benefit your business, let’s make sure we are on the same page about what residential proxies are. 

 

Residential proxies explained

First things first, let’s make sure you understand what residential proxies are.

They are servers that can contain one or several IP addresses and can act as intermediaries between the devices your business uses and the websites you visit. The provider of the service will assign a proxy to each user. 

Now, there are several types of proxies out there, including data center proxy, shared proxy, dedicated proxies, and residential proxy. Yet, residential proxies are among the most popular and used because they are more genuine-looking when compared to the other types. What does this mean? It means that the IP address assigned to you will look similar to a normal residential user’s IP. 

How do residential proxies work? Well, think of them as intermediaries between your device and the website you access. The proxy is basically the IP address that will appear on the website you access when you browse the web instead of your device’s real IP address. 

 

Benefits of using residential proxies

So far, so good. But how do residential proxies actually help your business? 

Competitive intelligence 

One of the most important use cases of residential proxies for companies is competitive intelligence. Popular online services such as Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix are blocking entire ranges of IP addresses that belong to particular providers. Yet, this will no longer be a problem since a residential proxy helps your IP address look like the one used by a real person. So, if you need to send numerous requests, using residential proxies will allow you to send them from different IP addresses from anywhere around the world.

Protect your brand’s name

Another great benefit of using residential proxies is that it can help you protect your brand from counterfeiters. How? Fake sellers often restrict access to their website from countries where the real manufacturer’s offices are located. This makes it really difficult for your brand to identify if there’s a fake seller that takes advantage of your brand’s name and fame. But, using residential proxies can help you get an IP address from the same country as the website of the counterfeit and gather all the necessary data about them. 

Marketing 

Residential proxies can also help your business in terms of marketing and advertising. How? You can use residential proxies to see how particular online ads from your strategy look in search results for users from various locations from around the globe.