Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Catching Cloaked and Geo-Targeted Ads Competitors Hide From You
Competitor ads you cannot see from your desk are not hidden by accident. Here is how cloaking and geo-targeting work, and how to see what real users are shown.
James Meadow · September 1, 2026 Verifying Ad Placements at Scale: A Playbook for AdTech Teams
A verification programme is a sampling strategy, an evidence standard, and an escalation path. Here is how to design all three so findings get acted on.
Matt Brown · September 1, 2026 How to Detect Ad Fraud Across 195+ Countries in Real Time
You cannot detect fraud from the dashboard reporting it. Detection means checking placements from real user vantage points, in every market, continuously.
James Meadow · September 1, 2026 Automating Daily Keyword Position Monitoring with a SERP API
Scheduling the fetch is the easy part. Here is the pipeline that turns daily SERP calls into a rank series you can trust, alert on, and explain to a client.
Chris Collins · September 1, 2026 Configuring Residential Proxies in Selenium and Playwright
The gateway is identical for both, but proxy authentication is not. Here is the same setup in each framework and the differences that shape your architecture.
Chris Collins · August 31, 2026 Are Residential Proxies Legal? What You Need to Know
Using a proxy is legal in most places. What you do through it, and how the network sourced its addresses, is where the actual risk sits.
James Meadow · August 31, 2026 Common Residential Proxy Errors and How to Fix Them
Every proxy failure falls into one of eight patterns, and the status code usually tells you which. Start here, identify the symptom, then go to the fix.
Matt Brown · August 31, 2026 Setting Up Residential Proxies in cURL and Postman
Both tools handle proxies well, and both have a setting that quietly breaks things. Here is the working configuration for each, and how to debug the rest.
Chris Collins · August 31, 2026