Residential IP Geo-targeting can be confusing at first, and when you begin to investigate things like city accuracy, ASN matching, or why certain locations perform better than you start to get confused. After knowing the fundamentals, the entire process is much easier to handle.
I will explain it all in this guide, so you know what can be done, what can not and how to achieve the best results without wasting time and bandwidth.
It is good to have a sense of a few basic terms before we get into city and ASN targeting to ensure that everything makes sense.
A real IP from an internet service provider (ISP) tied to a home connection and not a datacenter.
Choosing a proxy IP that appears to come from a specific city.
An identification number of an ISP or a network. ASN matching can be used to impersonate users of a particular provider, such as Comcast, Spectrum, or Vodafone.
How often the proxy actually delivers the location or ASN you requested.
We are going to discuss the process of city targeting, the ASN matching process, what influences the accuracy, how to quantify success and how to achieve better results with simple changes.
City targeting isn’t exact. When you choose a city, the proxy does not utilize GPS or something like that. It depends on the location the ISP has assigned to that IP. So when you request a city, the network searches its pool for IPs that the ISP lists as being in that area.
These records are sometimes correct and sometimes a little bit off. One database can indicate the IP within the city, and another one is just outside.
That’s why results vary. Once you understand how residential proxy server workit’s easier to see that good city targeting mostly depends on clean ISP data and having enough IPs to choose from.
ASN targeting is similar to city targeting except that it targets the internet provider rather than the location. Each ISP has its ASN and the number informs the websites of what network the traffic is entering.
The proxy network will search in its pool to find the IPs that are part of that particular provider when you pick an ASN. In case the pool contains a sufficient number of IPs in that ISP, then you get a match. Otherwise, you will either receive a nearby ASN or a no match.
No trick, no hidden system, just whether the provider has enough IPs of that network in the first place.
ASN targeting is typically more accurate than city targeting, since ISP records are more accurate than location data, however, the outcome is still based on the size and the freshness of the IP pool.
There are a couple of factors that determine how successful you will be in receiving the city or ASN of your choice.
The largest one is the size of the IP pool of the provider. Failure to acquire sufficient IPs of the city or ISP of your choice will reduce the accuracy.
The second one is the frequency of the provider updating its geolocation and ASN records since the old data or the old records causes a mismatch.
The ISP information is also a concern, as certain providers provide cleaner and more consistent data than others.
And lastly, how the proxy network filters and allocates IPs also contributes to it, well maintained systems give more accurate matches than those that were not updated recently.
Many people expect a “100% exact match, ” but residential IPs don’t work like that.
Different geolocation databases often show slightly different results, so the goal is to get consistent matches across the most common ones, not perfection.
A good test includes a few basic steps.
First, check the IP on multiple lookup tools and compare the results, one tool alone can be misleading.
Then check the ASN, city, and nearby city fields to see if the IP is at least in the correct region.
After that, test a small batch of IPs instead of relying on a single one, because accuracy becomes clearer when you look at patterns, not one-time results.
If you want better accuracy with city or ASN targeting, there are a few steps that make a real difference.
