If you, like me, work in a business with a global reach, I suspect on more than one occasion you have wished you could teleport yourself around the world to be able to check something in another country. Whilst it would be handy to be able to teleport yourself over to Brazil to check out a cocktail bar in Copacabana, I’m referring to that SEO campaign for New Zealand that you have been working on for your client, or that localized UI for the Punjabi version of your site, or, to check that Boleto Bancario is only being offered to customers with a Brazilian geo-IP.
Targeting international customers often requires a website or an advertising campaign to determine the geo location of a visitor and to deliver specific content based on the user’s country, city or other criteria. This is critical if you want to make sure that your potential customer can read your website/ads or banner in his/her native language or pay in the domestic currency.
In addition, search results are becoming more and more location-focused. You need to refine your SEO bids so that your customer/visitors from Milan or Rome will see results that are more relevant.
For example, HMA! from Privax Ltd., a leading VPN (virtual private network) product, allows you to encrypt the data you send and receive and replaces your IP address, which is (very simply put!) the fingerprint of every Internet connection. Once you connect to HMA!, you can choose a server location (in over 65 countries) to obtain a local IP address, which in turn will hide your real location and identity and make you appear as if you teleported your computer to your desired location. Your traffic will be encrypted and you will enjoy free, uncensored access to any website by virtually residing in a different country, allowing you to service customers around the world.
Through my daily operations I have to ensure that our worldwide customers have access to local payment options and can pay in their local currency. In order to save travel expenses and time, I simply connect to the HMA! server of the country I am checking and see exactly what our customers in that country experience. It also aides me in monitoring that our in-house risk-prevention tools are working well, or that those credit card icons are relevant to a particular geo-IP.
But I’m not alone in finding this tool vital for my job. My colleagues from marketing find that HMA! is essential to manage ads and banners targeted to different countries, as well as ensuring that they have been correctly localized according to the visitors’ location.
For more information, please contact our customer support at sales@hidemyass.com.
David Francesconi is Payments and Operations Director at Privax Ltd., established in 2006 in London, UK, with the aim to provide online privacy and security, Privax is the company behind the Internet’s most popular Premium VPN service: www.hidemyass.com. HMA! leads the VPN market with the number of servers and IP addresses it offers and is the go-to tool for anyone who wants to surf the web freely, securely and with no restrictions.
