Growing visibility through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and presenting the most favorable deals to clients helps companies stand out in an extremely competitive digital business environment.
Nowadays, each successful company employs technically proficient data scientists who target all aspects of market research to maximize online sales and grow brand visibility.
However, the best spots of digital real estate are often dominated by the most popular businesses in their respective market, and depending on the products and services offered, not everyone can achieve international success.
That being said, in most cases, that is not needed because businesses can focus on the local market or any other specific region targeted for expansion.
If we take a closer look at Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and social media feeds to track paid ads, most advertisers choose to target one specific area, mainly because clients often include location names and phrases like “near me” to emphasize the proximity as a key aspect for the desired goods and services.
Gathering market research from local websites is a lot easier because your connections already have a local public IP address.
However, expanding to a foreign market requires a closer understanding of how different the web experience is for a user in a remote region. To overcome geolocation barriers, marketers use proxies and other privacy tools to access restricted websites for research or automated data extraction.
This article covers the basics of market research for Apple users with the help of proxies as a key anonymity solution.
Here you will learn how data scientists gather public competitor data, expand their social media presence, and visit any website without interruptions while enjoying the efficiency and convenience of Apple’s ecosystem.
How do Geolocation Barriers Work?
A geolocation barrier is a restriction imposed by the geoIP technology that prevents access to the site, its content, or just specific parts of the page based on the visitor’s physical location. However, there are good reasons why approximated tracking can be beneficial: internet users who enjoy personalized offers can always see the most relevant ads and search results, taking into account both the query and the visitor’s region.
Geoblocking is also used to restrict unnecessary web traffic from other regions, ensuring that only visitors from desired locations can enter the site. A different version of the internet exists for each user, and a lot of it changes depending on your location.
It is also worth mentioning that geoblocking restrictions should be reversed, where blocking is not done by the recipient but enforced by Internet Service Providers (ISP) through government agencies. The most famous case of geoblocking is China’s Great Firewall, which isolates the country and its massive user base from the rest of the internet, blocking access to the most famous social platforms and Western search engines.
Overcoming Geoblocking for Market Research
To access information from all regions, business owners utilize data scraping software, pairing it with proxies for IP address masking. The best proxy server providers offer residential addresses in all countries, allowing researchers to access all target locations at the same time and keep an eye on price intelligence, product availability, client satisfaction level, and other market trends.
If information is extracted from a big and localized platform, data analysts can use multiple data scraping bots at the same time to target the same page and compare how the shopping experience adjusts once you change your internet access point with just a few clicks.
Having control over the displayed approximate location is even more beneficial for targeting e-commerce platforms and travel ticket sellers, as these companies are known to adjust prices based on location, offering higher prices for clients in wealthier locations.
Seeing the web from different access points helps businesses gain a competitive advantage, as they can analyze extracted insights to learn how successful competitors dominate their market and efficiently expand their market share in remote regions.
Automating Data Collection
Market researchers can tackle two problems with the swift deployment of proxy servers. For a quick, efficient, and most importantly – automated extraction of competitor insights, specialists encounter two main problems: location-based restrictions and IP ban risks for accessing the site with automated software. Proxies solve these issues by providing an intermediary connection.
Apple users can route connections through a proxy server by establishing the link in the network configuration options. In just a few seconds users can pick any location supplied by the proxy provider, and start extracting information with ease.
For less frequent and much cheaper data collection tasks, marketers use Python with its powerful scraping libraries to automate data extraction from a desired website. Once configured, a well-written script can be multiplied to support different iterations, each supported with another proxy address. As for faster and more refined access to geo-blocked data, tools like Octoparse and ParseHub can be configured to scrape data from websites as if they were being accessed from different locations.
How to Connect to a Proxy on a Mac device
Once you have a solid plan from a reputable proxy provider, follow these steps:
- Click on the Apple Menu
- Select system preferences
- Click on Network
- Choose your active network connection
- Click on Advanced
- Go to the “Proxies” tab
- Select your proxy type
- Enter Proxy server IP and Port
- Enter your username and Password
That’s it! Make sure to test your connection once the link is established.
