In the realm of ad trafficking, it is important to be able to quickly provide advertiser and agency customers with up-to-date screenshots of their ad campaigns running on your site quickly upon request. That's not such a big deal if your campaigns aren't subject to specific targeting parameters. But if you are running a lot of high-value geo-targeted ads, the task of getting real screenshots of webpages as viewed from specific countries, states or cities becomes a nearly impossible task. You have to either know some cooperative soul in your desired geographic region, have access to a proxy server in that location, or be able to connect to a remote server. Good luck with that!
Last year we started using a simple and affordable service that solves this problem. Called "Hide My Ass" (HMA), it is an advanced VPN (virtual private network) service that was originally intended for security purposes, but which works really well when applied to ad trafficking to view websites from geo-specific locations. Yes, it's a silly name, but an invaluable service for ad operations professionals.
Unlike a simple proxy, HMA allows you to anonymously encrypt your entire internet connection for any software or protocol. You get to choose which country and, in many cases, which state or city you wish to access the internet from and you can turn it on or off at any time.
As an ad operations manager with responsibility for dozens of geo-targeted screenshots each month, we have saved and bundle of time and money using this VPN tool.
Posted via email from Ad Delivery Solutions's Blog By SocialNetGate
