Your ad platform tells you how many impressions and clicks you paid for. It doesn’t show you what a person in Madrid saw when your ad loaded, which page it appeared on, or where the click actually led.
You can’t check that from your own desk either, because you’re probably not in the audience you’re targeting. Proxies let you load pages and search results from the countries, cities and mobile networks your campaigns are aimed at, and see the ads that real people there are shown.
Why you can't verify ads from your office
Ads are targeted, and you’re usually outside the target:
- Campaigns are aimed at specific countries, regions or cities.
- Many are split by device, so phone users see different ads from desktop users.
- Some target particular mobile networks.
- Frequency limits mean you stop seeing an ad after you’ve seen it a few times.
Reports from ad networks are useful, but they show what was counted, not what was displayed. Checking from real viewer connections fills that gap.
What to check
- Geography. Your ad appears in the markets you’re paying for, and not in the ones you excluded.
- The right creative. The correct language, currency, offer and size for each market.
- Placement. The sites your ad shows up on are ones you’re happy to be associated with.
- The landing page. A click leads to your page, in the right language, and nothing in between redirects it somewhere else.
- Your brand in search ads. Who is bidding on your brand name, and what their ads say.
Catching fraud and cloaking
Some bad actors show one thing to reviewers and another to real people. This is called cloaking. A reviewer coming from a hosting company or a known office network sees a clean page. A shopper on a home connection sees a fake store, a scam offer or a page full of hidden ads.
Because cloaking relies on telling real visitors apart from checkers, the check needs to look like a real visitor. Residential and mobile IPs come from ordinary households and phones, which is why they’re the standard for this work and why datacenter IPs are a poor fit.
The same applies to affiliate abuse, for example:
- affiliates bidding on your brand name in countries where they think you won’t look
- redirect chains that slip an affiliate tag into traffic you would have got anyway
- copycat stores using your name, logo or product photos
Residential or mobile proxies
Residential proxies cover most ad checks. Target each country, state or city in your media plan and you see what a household viewer there sees.
Mobile proxies are the right choice for mobile campaigns. Your traffic goes over real 4G and 5G connections, and you can target specific carriers when a campaign is aimed at one network.
Rotate to a fresh IP between checks. Coming back from the same address again and again makes you look like one person who has already seen the ad, which is exactly when frequency limits kick in.
Setting up a checking routine
- List every market in your media plan, down to the city where the campaign is that specific.
- For each market, pick the proxy type that matches the audience: residential, mobile, or both.
- Load the pages, apps or searches where your ads should appear.
- When you follow an ad through to its landing page, use a sticky session so the whole path happens on one IP.
- Save a screenshot along with the location, date and time, and every address the click passed through.
- Repeat at different times of day, because many campaigns run on a schedule.
Start small: a handful of checks per market per day tells you a lot. Increase the number for markets where you find problems.
Keep evidence you can use
When you find a problem, you’ll usually need to show it to someone: an ad network, an agency, an affiliate manager or a legal team. A screenshot with the time, the country and the full redirect path is much harder to argue with than “we saw it once.” Many ad networks will credit spend for ads that ran in the wrong place, but only with proof.
Be careful with clicks
Loading a page that shows your ad can count as an impression, and clicking it costs you money and muddies your campaign data. Keep checks to the volume you actually need, open your landing pages directly where you can, and only follow the ad click itself when you’re checking the redirect path. Never click competitors’ ads to run up their costs. That’s click fraud, and it isn’t allowed on our network.
Budgeting bandwidth
Ad checks use more data than plain scraping, because you need the page to load properly, images and ads included. Plan for a few megabytes per check. For example, 10 markets with 20 checks a day each, at around 3 MB per check, comes to about 18 GB a month. That’s roughly $30.42 on residential proxies or $63.00 on mobile proxies, and unused bandwidth carries over.
Questions and answers
- What is ad verification?
- Ad verification means checking that your ads actually appear where and how you paid for them: in the right countries, on suitable websites, with the correct creative and with a working landing page. It also covers spotting fraud, such as fake placements or affiliates misusing your brand.
- Why use proxies instead of a VPN for ad verification?
- VPN addresses usually belong to hosting companies, cover few cities and are shared by many users, so ad platforms and fraudsters recognise them easily. Residential and mobile proxies come from real household and phone connections in the exact location you choose, so you see what a real viewer sees.
- Should I use residential or mobile proxies for ad checks?
- Use residential proxies for most desktop and general web checks, and mobile proxies for mobile campaigns or campaigns targeted at specific carriers. Many teams use both from the same balance.
- Do ad checks count as impressions?
- They can. Loading a page that displays your ad may be counted as an impression, and clicking it is counted as a click. Keep the number of checks to what you need and open landing pages directly when you don't need to test the click path.