Geographic IP Emulator?

I have a national client that wants to start geo-targeting PPC ads in specific regions and US cities. Being an untrusting sole, he feels the need to confirm that the ads are being displayed in those areas.

Is there a tool or way to emulate a specific IP in that region to see the ads? Ideally a web base tool would be best, but any ideas would be great.

This is my first post – please be gentle.

Thanks.
WebThisWay

 

If it is Adsense related you can use the preview tool but i think this is not what you are looking for...is it?

 

No, but thanks.

What I’m looking for a way to make the search engine or site think that I’m in different city or region. But I need to be able control the region selected. Getting the IP to emulate is not difficult. Being able to use it is where I’m stuck.

Thanks.

 

What you are talking about is IP Spoofing, which will get you nowhere fast.

Your best solution is to get a machine that is in each of the defined regions that you are looking to test. You may want to talk to a few windows hosting companies about borrowing a machine for a short period of time for your testing, or asking them to do the testing for you since renting even a VPS in several regions just for this usage is not likely cost effective.

Another solution would be to find a free proxy site in each of the regions that you are looking at, but in that situation, if the ads / geotargetting is dependant on javascript you will see the geotargetted ads local to your machine.

I don't know of any commercially available solution to your problem.

 

You could acces more information about geoip targeting maxmind.com it utilizes Geographical IP Targeting would be usefull for everyone.

 

Thanks for the links. I’m continuing to soak as much of this up I can.

I can respect that IP Spoofing is a dangerous area and that it is used for evil more often than not. It is a small client only spending about 2k a month. He wants to see the ads showing in selected US regions.

Thanks for your suggestions.
WebThisWay

 

I'm not so much saying that IP Spoofing is evil. Just because the term is associated with hacking doesn't make it bad. In fact, I'm always disappointed that hacking is considered by most to be synonymous with crime and evil. Half the millionaires in California were hackers at one time or another. But anyways to get to the point...

IP Spoofing won't be useful to you because it inherently means that the traffic is one way - since you don't send your actual IP as a return address, the traffic has no way of getting back to your machine.

I think your only no-cost solution is going to be the use of anonymous proxies - but you'll need an actual proxy - not just a proxy web page (I would think), unless the proxy web page also routes ajax and javascript routines through the proxy, which is a possibility, it just wasn't how the OOB solutions worked the last time I played around with them (a few years ago).