In case you haven’t already figured it out, the Internet is an international place. Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or you’re looking to promote your own business, it pays to have a global perspective. How your website looks in Louisiana may not be the same as how it looks in Laos.
Offering a simple way for you to get this worldwide viewpoint is GeoSurf. The idea is that you can get the “local perspective” from many different local areas. Over the course of this review, we’ll see how it works, how well it works, and whether it’s worth your investment.
Why Not Use a Free Proxy?
I know that when I first heard about GeoSurf, that was the first question that popped in my mind. You may already know of a free proxy or two that will let you view your website from the perspective of another state or country.
Well, free proxies have the same kinds of problems as all kinds of other free services: they can be buggy, slow, and unreliable. GeoSurf claims that it has four key advantages over these free alternatives: reliability, privacy, credibility, and transparency.
Because it owns its own servers, GeoSurf guarantees 99% uptime. Also, it guarantees that your surfing data will be kept private. Free proxies sometimes make money by exploiting this data, selling it to third parties or profiting from it in some other way.
How Does GeoSurf Work?
It doesn’t really matter if a tool like this is powerful and robust if it’s impossibly hard to use. Thankfully, GeoSurf is pretty straightforward. Here is a demo video that they have provided.
As you can see, you get a simple toolbar that adds itself to your web browser. You select your target country from the drop-down menu and apply your decision. From then on out, all webpages will be displayed as if you were surfing from that country.
This is great for geo-targeted campaigns that you may be running, for example. It’s also very useful for affiliate marketers wanting to promote offers not available in their area. I know that many affiliate networks have plenty of US-only offers; whether you’re actually in London, Ontario or London, England, you can see what your target demographic is seeing.
What Countries Are Included?
There are many different reasons why you would want to see a website from the perspective of a visitor from another country. In order for GeoSurf to offer any kind of real value, it needs to offer a broad range of countries. In that respect, it succeeds.
The pull-down menu lists the countries in alphabetical order, so it’s pretty easy to find and choose your target location. Among the countries included in the GeoSurf toolbar are Brazil, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Panama, Russia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.
One thing about this geo-target toolbar that is a small cause for concern is that it is currently only available for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. I’m a Chrome browser and I’m sure there are lots of people who use Safari exclusively.
Even if GeoSurf doesn’t produce a toolbar for these browsers, an in-browser web portal of some kind may prove useful.
How Much Does It Cost?
Yes, you can go with the free proxy route to achieve similar functionality, but GeoSurf offers its fair share of advantages too. The pricing scheme is reasonably competitive too.
Plans start at just $29 a month and there’s no reason why you couldn’t share this single account with multiple employees at your company. It is limited to just 200MB of bandwidth a month at this level, though, so you may want to be a little more selected with where you surf.
The $59/month Pro plan adds in the ability to preview sites through a simulated WAP browser, which is pretty useful for mobile advertising and mobile promotions. It also increases the monthly bandwidth allotment to 500MB.
You can recoup some of these costs through the affiliate program. GeoSurf operates through ClickBank and it pays a 50% commission for every sale generated. That’s a lifetime commission for however long your referral subscribes to the GeoSurf service.
There is a free five-day trial on any package size, but you will need to provide your credit card information to get the free trial.
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Awesome! I was looking for something like this. I don’t think there is any proxy or VPN service which has so many countries. This is really good.
Neat service. It takes the work out of finding a good proxy for a certain country.
But I don’t really need this at this moment. I’ll stick to free proxies.
Awesome tool indeed. But the price is a little expensive for me to be honest.
Yes many people will be get effected by the price factor.
Free proxies are not always the best pick.
Depends of what kind of free proxies you can get. For example in my experience looking for a working proxy always takes longer than I expect.
Yes this is very much true and if you want to get flawless proxies than you will have to pay … no doubt.
I agree! I was also looking for something like this!
This is a really cool service, I see the advantages of using GeoSurf vs others.
Yes if you will pay than you will get the right service.
Every good thing have some value and so its have also.
Thank you for this blog post. It is very helpful and save me a lot of time to go search for a good proxy.
That’s why we like John’s blog because you will get reliable source from here.
For its country selection feature, this seems very useful – thanks for posting. Would love to hear some more feedback from you with respect to privacy using these types of services. I wouldn’t touch TOR with a 10 foot pole and free proxies are, as you mentioned, way too risky to use. Through my research I found that Xero Bank’s service is the fastest and, most importantly, the most private (on account of their legal protections/circumventions) but I’ve heard very reputable sources say that none of these services can 100% guarantee privacy. I believe the issue came down to making sure that NO data related to your browsing activities are stored anywhere and that no company would (or could, I don’t remember) do this.
Hi Michael,
Good review as always but right now I have no need for this service.
If that changes I’ll have an idea where to look.
Thanks,
Vance
Just keep this information with you … you never know in future you can require this kind of service when you want to expand your business.
To be honest, I find it very, very expensive considering what you get.
Sure, the servers they must be running gotta be expensive, real expensive.
But we’re talking servers that can hold say 2000gb transfer each. And paying 89 bucks. a 3rd of what a server costs. You get 0.5% out of that. So you can use 5 servers.
So summary, you pay for 30% of a server, but get to use 2.5% of its capacity.
It’s enough with them using up less than 10% of their capacity and profit. That’s why I believe the service is a bit expensive.
thank you for this , i didn’t know about these functions before actually and this is very helpful to be checking reviews daily
thank You
Checking reviews ??? Did not get you …
We use something like this when prototyping ecommerce sites.
It lets us see how the user interface of popular sites look in different target countries, eg in Asia the surname often comes first.
Sticking with proxies, I setted one up speciall for this
Good info. But I still don’t really understand the advantage over a similar free service. This is a bit more useful but also pricy so a free service might do that trick.
It looks like a needed product and pretty useful, but at $89 a month for 5 countries. it seems pretty expensive.
The price works for a corporate customer no prob but agree it’s pricey for an affiliate/small biz.
Yes. The price is bit high. If you need privacy then you need to pay for it.
They should come with the individual account as well.
I guess the idea is to make lots and lots of monies, then you don’t have to worry about the cost.
Well wont their IP address be banned very quick just like free proxy since they are so public?
Considering what they cost, I don’t think you’ll have it that public.
Wow thanks for sharing! I was looking for a tool like this. Google offers the ad preview tool but I have no way to QA my adCenter ads in different states. Looking forward to checking this out!
This is Great Info! I’ve been looking for this kind of solution for a long time! I use free proxies, but they manipulate the content, and they are quite slow and not stable. Thanks for this valuable info!
To expensive for a service like that I think
I can see the use for it but I don’t need it so much I’ll pay these prices.
That’s a pretty cool service. I’ll have to give that a try with our company website since we are an international company. It would be great to know what people see in other countries when they visit our site.
Richard,
You make a great point. This is an ideal service for companies that do business internationally. I also want to check it out.
All the best,
Ian
Well its for liars, haha
As a webmaster there’s a danger you think the world begins and ends in your country. Geosurf is neat as it shows you a much bigger world. I think this could be a really useful tool.
Terry
Yes quite agree with you.
Internet is not limited to one country hence you should think about the major countries.
I can see the value in this type of service. Great review, it nicely explained and demonstrated what GeoSurf is all about.
You posted the same thing, twice!
Something like this becomes more and more useful as Google continues to change local search. I would really like something that showed me results by the city and not just by the country. That could be really useful for those of us who work with businesses on local seo.
Very useful tool to use because blog or websites make global customers and it’s our duty to make them loyal one.
Boy this one is sounding really great.
Would love to give it a try …