Proxies for ad verification

Ad servers make targeting decisions from the requesting IP. Verify from the wrong IP class and you measure a placement no real user ever saw.

The problem

Ad delivery is decided in real time, partly from geography and partly from what the exchange infers about the requester. A datacenter address is a strong signal that the requester is not a consumer.

The practical result is that verification traffic can be served a different creative, a house ad, or nothing at all — while genuine users in that market see the campaign you were trying to check.

Fraud detection has the same problem in reverse: you cannot confirm where a placement actually ran without observing it from that place.

What we would configure

Proxy type: Residential, or mobile for in-app inventory
Rotation: Per request — each impression should look independent
Targeting: The exact geography the campaign was bought against
Protocol: HTTP or HTTPS

This is the use case where IP provenance is the measurement rather than an implementation detail. Datacenter traffic does not just risk a block — it risks a silently wrong answer, which is worse.

A real connection

Built from the same parameter grammar the network accepts — copy it and change the country.

Verify a French campaign from a consumer address

user-USERNAME-type-residential-country-fr-rotation--1

Per-request rotation makes each impression look independent, which is what the exchange expects from separate users.

What goes wrong

Verifying from a datacenter IP and concluding a campaign is not running when it is
Reusing one address across many impressions, which makes the pattern obvious to the exchange
Checking country when the campaign was bought at city or regional level
Using residential for mobile in-app inventory, where a carrier IP is what the exchange expects

Questions

Why not verify from our office connection?: One office is one location and one IP reputation. You would be measuring what your office is served, not what the market you bought is served — and repeated requests from a single address quickly stop looking like distinct users.
Residential or mobile?: Residential for web inventory, mobile for in-app. The exchange expects a carrier address for mobile placements, and a residential one is a mismatch in that context.
Can I confirm an ad ran in a specific city?: Only by observing from that city. City targeting exists for this — verifying a city-bought campaign at country level tells you nothing about whether the city targeting worked.

Proxy types for this

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