Almost every business has gone through the digital transformation and is now operating online. Running an online business brings a whole new world of opportunities for organizations, but it also results in the competition growing exponentially.
Keeping an eye on your competitors is one of the best ways to remain relevant and competitive, and businesses need to think twice before making any decisions. Since they need data to improve the decision-making process, organizations greatly depend on their ability to use market research to their advantage.
Using proxies for market research allows businesses to gather valuable data. According to some statistics, market research allows companies to grow their business and increase revenue. So, let’s see what proxies are, how they work, and why you should use them for market research.
What Are Proxies and How Do They Work?
In their essence, proxies are like a bridge between the user and the internet. They take your request, run it through their servers, hide your real IP address in the process, and allow you to connect to the web.
Each time you try to connect to the internet, a proxy uses its server to allow you to do it, changing and masking your IP along the way to ensure more privacy and anonymity, safer connection, prevent tracking and monitoring, and so much more.
Proxies work by giving you more privacy and anonymity while browsing the web. They act as intermediaries, gateways between the internet and your device. Because of their ability to change your IP address, proxies are an excellent way to bypass content filters, but they can do so much more than just that.
By processing all web traffic through their servers, proxies effectively boost your online anonymity and privacy, which is exactly what businesses need to scrape data successfully from target websites without getting detected or being blocked.
Not All Proxies Are the Same (types of proxies)
There are two main types of proxies:
- Residential proxies – provide IP addresses assigned by ISPs to the user. These IPs are real IP addresses with a real physical location, making them perfect for web scraping because they can imitate organic browsing behavior. Residential proxies help businesses scrape relevant market research data from the leading websites by providing higher privacy levels and reducing the chances of being blocked or detected by the target websites.
- Datacenter proxies – providing users with complete anonymity and the highest level of private IP authentication, data centers aren’t assigned to users by ISPs as they come from secondary corporations. This type of proxy is designed to fully imitate a real internet connection, making it ideal for web scraping needs.
While residential proxies provide unprecedented flexibility when choosing your web scraping targets globally, datacenter proxies are unmatched in response times.
What is Market Research
If you want to sell more and grow your business, you need to stay ahead of the competition in your business niche. Having valuable insight into the market is one of the best ways to beat your competitors and enhance the way you manage your sales.
Market research is a necessity today. If you conduct it regularly, it can help yield a wide range of benefits to your business. You get to know everything about your competitors and customers, their dislikes, likes, behavioral patterns, purchase decisions, insights, and more.
The data that market research gives you can help your business make more educated decisions about entering new markets, creating new products, etc. All the information you need is right there on the leading websites.
However, the most reputable websites don’t take kindly to businesses that try to scrape data from them. So, you need a reliable way to get the data required to ensure healthy business growth.
Using Proxies for Market Research
Businesses use proxies for market research because they need the data to understand what the market demands. They use market research to:
- Stay on track with the latest industry trends.
- Understand the needs of customers.
- Keep an eye on the competition.
- Learn what improvements and changes need to be made.
- Get ahead of the consumers’ expectations.
Now, the two most common types of proxy businesses use to scrape data for market research are residential and datacenter proxies. Let’s compare the two proxy types, their pros, and cons:
- Datacenter proxies are much faster than their residential counterparts, establishing quick connections.
- Datacenter proxies are dedicated proxies, meaning they ensure maximum reliability and 99% uptime.
- Since datacenter proxies require almost no maintenance, they are more affordable than residential proxies. On top of all that, they support IP rotation, allowing you to save on your maintenance and data extraction monitoring.
- Residential proxies are excellent for data harvesting due to high anonymity, but they can easily be detected and blocked by the target websites.
Which Type of Proxies is Best for Market Research?
When it comes to the best type of proxies for market research, we can safely say that data center proxies are the best solution. Their main qualities are:
- Reliability
- High speed
- Increased privacy
- IP rotation
The additional perk of datacenter proxies is that they don’t need an internet connection or an ISP. If you are interested in starting using proxies for market research, we suggest you check the Oxylabs website for more information.
Bottom Line
With proxy servers by your side, your business can easily retrieve valuable data and apply it to create top solutions that will allow you to grow your operations and appeal more to your target audience. If you need proxies to do your market research, we hope that this short guide to choosing the right proxy will help you make the right decision.
