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 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 What Is a Peer-to-Peer Residential Proxy Network?
Instead of servers in a datacenter, the network is made of ordinary people's devices. Here is how that works, what you get from it, and what you give up.
Matt Brown · August 30, 2026 How Residential Proxy Providers Ethically Source Their IPs
The addresses are real people's home connections, so the question that matters is whether they agreed. Here is what good sourcing looks like and how to check.
James Meadow · August 30, 2026 Which Countries Have the Best Residential Proxy Availability?
There is no fixed ranking, and the only availability that matters is the one in your markets at your concurrency. Here is what drives it and how to measure it.
James Meadow · August 30, 2026 How to Plan Request Volume and Concurrency on Residential Proxies
Work backwards from the records you need to the requests, concurrency and bandwidth they imply. The arithmetic is simple and it stops most capacity surprises.
Matt Brown · August 29, 2026