Ad verification with residential proxies

On Astro, a trusted proxy website, anyone can buy the best residential, mobile and datacenter IPs or try them for free. We offer geo targeted proxies as well as static, rotating, individual, anonymous, public, shared, transparent, etc. Today, let’s talk about ad verification and how proxies help in this popular business task.

The need for ad verification is one of many reasons why proxies’ (residential, datacenter, etc.) popularity is skyrocketing. No business or individual wants to end up with money wasted because their ads fail to reach the target audience due to improper placement or criminal activities. With competition getting tougher every day, the demand for effective and reliable advertisement increases, and advertisers expect bigger profit from their investments. A residential proxy rented on a trusted proxy website appears to be a decent tool that helps pinpoint and disrupt barriers between a business and its audience.

What is ad verification?

Ad verification is a set of activities, which advertisers undertake to ensure that their ads are displayed in the right way. The correct ad placement attracts bigger audience and, as a result, results in bigger profit for the publisher. More specifically, advertisers ensure that an ad’s elements and parameters meet those specified in the ad campaign settings. To do so, they incorporate verification tags and beacons in the ad markup, which help them check the publisher’s content and its relevance for the ad.

The final goal is ensuring that the ad has gotten through to the audience and made them want to buy goods and services advertised. Also, advertisers want to be sure that their ads are placed on respective pages and in an appropriate context, which will not avert potential customers.

Largely, ad verification implies protecting ads against different types of fraud, which include fake impressions and clicks. Geo targeted proxies help to check how ads are displayed in different geographic locations (localized ad verification) and prevent fraud (vendor verification).

What is ad fraud?

Hackers use multiple dishonest tactics to boost their traffic statistics. They are very skilled and come up with new sophisticated methods every day to simulate traffic, falsify clicks and impressions. This causes a lot of financial trouble for advertisers, because ad scams thus steal their conversions, pay per click, and rob them of return on investment (ROI). They run fake websites, which look very similar to original ones and thus secretly redirect traffic to them. On top of that, they automate the process by using multiple accounts, ad click bots and scripts. By statistics, advertisers lose $1 out of every $3 due to these fraudulent activities.

Why is ad verification a must?

Hacker attacks can rob you of a good share of ROI and reduce part of your effort to ashes. If you fail to verify your ad campaign, you may lose it all before you understand what is happening. For this reason, marketers, SEO specialists and ad agencies buy residential proxies. They choose a trusted proxy website with a trustworthy network (for example, Astro) to buy residential IPs. These IPs help to conduct ad campaigns in the right way, that’s why they are an absolute must.

Proper ad verification can help you ensure contextual brand safety. Very often fraudsters place ads on inappropriate resources abounding in adult and/or violent content, which can seriously impair your name. Also, you should be very careful if you are advertising alcohol, tobacco, medicines, and other products, because their distribution and sales are regulated differently in different countries. In this case, you should choose a proper verification strategy, ensuring that you are acting under the laws.

If you are advertising your brand in a country, where geo-restrictions by IP are a common practice, you need a tool, which can help you fly in under the radar. On Astro you can buy residential and mobile proxies, as well as the best datacenter proxies, to connect you to a proxy server located in this country and disguise you as one of its regular citizens. You can then visit local publishers via this homeowner’s device and go on ad verifying without being spotted.

Why residential proxies instead of datacenter proxies?

Fraudulent sites do not want to surrender their positions and always try to outwit and block those who counter their criminal work. Even the best datacenter proxies are cheaper to buy than residential and mobile ones; they are more popular but less reliable. They have pools of IP addresses belonging to advertisers who want to protect their campaigns. Besides, they are all savvies and know how to avoid exposure. If you try to track a fraudster site via a datacenter IP, you will appear on their radar after a little while and get blocked immediately.

If you have signed up with a trusted website like Astro, you have a pool of thousands of residential proxies. A residential proxy is nothing less than a regular homeowner’s device (PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone) with an IP address, to which the network will connect you. From now on, whatever website you visit, it will see the user’s IP address, not yours. Because it is a regular user’s IP, they will have few reasons to suspect you, because you are indistinguishable from any other residential IP owner. Given the huge size of the pool and an opportunity to change an IP address at a brief time interval (backconnect residential proxies), fraudsters have zero chance to catch up with you.

What deters many advertisers from using residential proxies is their somewhat high price compared to datacenter proxies. True, buying residential IPs costs more. However, given the more than 30% ROI loss inflicted by ad fraud, a tariff of $0.1 per IP and $3 per gigabyte appears quite a trade-off. In this context, joining Astro has to be your most favorable investment and the most cost-effective way to keep ad fraudsters away from your business.

Extend your target audience with Astro

Given the above information, Astro is a great option for you if you are going to promote your brand in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Germany and France. Just find your geo targeted audience in any of these countries, buy residential IPs located in these countries, connect to them, and monitor your ad campaign safely and effectively. No fraudulent website or hacker group will be aware that you are tracking your campaign. Once you are connected to a residential IP, you can see whether or not your ads and affiliate links are placed properly. If something goes wrong, you can take appropriate steps quickly. 

Astro offers high quality services at affordable prices whenever you need to buy residential, mobile and datacenter proxies or try a pool of IPs for free, with grouping by country, city, or providers.