Proxies for Ad Verification and Geo-Testing

For each campaign location, open the ad or landing page in a real browser through a proxy in that place, with a fresh profile and no stored cookies. Save a screenshot, the final URL, every redirect, the time and the exit IP, then compare them with what was bought. Repeat on a schedule and flag any differences between locations or runs.

City targeting, yes, if your campaigns are bought by city or metro area; country targeting is enough for national campaigns. ProxyField targets by country, region (state) and city; the carrier is not a targeting option. For mobile campaigns, use mobile proxies in the target country, which run on that country's carrier networks.

Ad fraud makes advertisers pay for impressions or clicks no real, interested person produced. Common methods are bots that load and click ads, ads stacked or hidden where no one can see them, fake or spoofed websites that pass themselves off as premium publishers, and cloaking that shows one page to checks and another to visitors. Verification compares what was reported with what a real visitor in the target place actually gets.

The main types are bot traffic (automated impressions and clicks), domain spoofing (cheap inventory sold as a premium site), ad stacking and pixel stuffing (ads layered or shrunk out of sight), click injection and attribution fraud in apps, and cloaking or malicious redirects. Each one leaves a gap between what the ad report says and what a visitor sees.

Cloaking shows a harmless page to ad reviewers and known checking IPs, and a different page or a redirect to real visitors. Proxies expose it by checking from residential and mobile IPs in the target location, which look like ordinary visitors, and by comparing those results with a check from your own network.

Rotate when you sample many impressions of the same placement, so each check is a new visitor and frequency caps do not hide the ad. Stay sticky, for 30 seconds to 36 hours, when you follow one click through its redirect chain to the landing page, since some chains expect the same visitor at every hop.

No. Location is only one targeting rule: the ad also depends on the campaign's schedule, budget, frequency caps, device and audience settings, and on the auction at that moment. Run several checks over time from the right place before you conclude an ad is missing.

Mobile proxies, where the campaign targets mobile carrier traffic, because they put your check on a 5G, 4G or LTE carrier network the way a phone user is. Residential proxies with a mobile browser profile cover mobile web ads that target by location only. Both draw on the same ProxyField balance.

For your own pages and for partners that do not filter by IP type, yes, and they cost less per GB. For third-party placements they are a weak choice, because fraud and cloaking setups can recognize datacenter ranges and serve them a clean version. Use residential IPs for the checks that matter.

With ProxyField you pay for traffic: residential proxies cost $2.95/GB for 1 GB and fall to $1.95/GB from 1,000 GB, and mobile proxies cost $3.45/GB down to $2.45/GB. A browser check of a 3 MB page uses 3 MB, so 1,000 checks a day come to about 90 GB a month. There is no subscription, and the traffic never expires.

For every check: the time with time zone, the exit IP and its location, a full-page screenshot, the HTML, the final URL and every redirect with its status code, plus the creative and the placement it appeared in. That record lets you show a publisher or network exactly what a visitor saw and when.

At launch, after every change to the campaign or its targeting, and then on a schedule that fits the spend, daily for large campaigns and several times a day where fraud has been a problem. Run checks at different times of day, because ad delivery changes with traffic and budgets.

No, though they use the same tools. Ad verification checks your own paid ads: where they ran, how they looked and where they led. Brand protection looks for others misusing your brand, such as counterfeit listings, fake sites and unauthorized sellers.

Yes, as long as you only look. Loading search results and pages from the markets your competitors target shows which ads they run there and what their landing pages say. Clicking competitors' ads to waste their budget is click fraud, which our acceptable use policy forbids.

They can make test requests come from real residential IPs in the regions you choose, which is what location-dependent features see. Use it to check content, redirects and performance per region at a modest rate. Load testing that floods a site with traffic is a different job, and attacks on systems you do not own are forbidden.

Usually because of the browser, not the proxy: an ad blocker or strict tracking protection, a cookie banner that was never accepted, or a headless browser that the ad network refuses to serve. A campaign that is not live in that location, or has hit its frequency cap or budget, shows nothing either. Test with a normal browser profile, accept the cookie banner and try another IP in the same city.