Gaming The PPC/Proxy Site Nexus
July 20th, 2007by On-On
I work on a variety of projects in online marketing and I’m pretty busy already, so this is nothing I’ve actually tried or even plan to try, but I thought I’d float it out there because I’ve not heard of it being done and it struck me as interesting.
I know that proxy sites are all the rage because they’re easy to set up and people can, with little labor, arbitrage them using CPC ads. I personally work in the affiliate-email-ppc-content site world, so this isn’t my bread and butter, but that doesn’t stop me from daydreaming on occasion. Last week I was checking Google from here in Asia without a proxy and a person who works with my client forgot for a moment about the territorial restrictions on the client’s PPC ads. He asked why our ads didn’t rank on the first page and I replied that “The ads aren’t showing up because they’re US only.” Following our exchange, we got into a discussion about using free net access to funnel people into an obscure IP range geolocated in a small or medium sized foreign country and then bidding up US-based ads in that country only while linking the ads to your sites.
I quickly pointed out that most people don’t use free net access and that providing it would be a pain and the discussion ended because, you know, we had actual work to do. Fast forward to the next day and this puzzle was still gnawing away at my brain. In theory, you could accomplish the same thing using proxy sites, instead of free net access, to small or medium sized countries. When the ads are presented through the proxy site, it would simply be necessary to have them launch in a new window, which would launch outside of the confines of the proxy and, therefore, place the user within a geolocated US IP range. This would obviate the problem with foreign IPs killing affiliate ads on the affiliate network end of the equation. The obvious benefit here is that bidding on terms in these obscure countries would no doubt be cheaper and you’d be competing for much less traffic, segmented to your chosen language and provided largely by you. Quite literally, you would have your very own captive audience.
I’ve been in this business for ten years, which is long enough to know that when you have a new idea it’s only new until you hit Google and figure out someone else has done it, but I thought this one was interesting enough to post about even if it has been done. I’d be interested to find out what experience anyone has had with such a method.
