Today's review goes out to Geosurf.com, a VPN and web proxy tool that allows you to access servers and IP's a lot of different locations. Geosurf has add-ons, toolbars, and web services for setting changing your proxies to better access your rankings and easier access to spying on your competitors from nearly any place in the world, or at least, any place you're targeting.

Checking your rankings or ads by location right now requires a set of proxies and IP's, changing settings, running VPN's, and checking the settings for each market you want to target. It's frustrating, slow, and you feel the money slipping out of your hands as you pour more time into changing the settings all the time. Geosurf's toolbar and web apps cut that process out, and in a few clicks you're surfing in Denver, a few more and you're checking rankings for Portland, and a few you're checking UK, Egypt, Finland, etc. Anywhere you want to check is just a couple clicks away. Pretty invaluable for researching any markets you want to launch some campaigns in.

Overall, it's a great tool. Small, easy to use, and fast, and you can hit nearly every major U.S. and international market easily. They've done it by providing you with access to a network of servers around the world. You press a few buttons on the web client or on your web browser, and it routes you through to a server in your target market, so you can see what you're up against, and who you're bidding against for traffic!

Geosurf doesn't filter content or ads, either. The page displays exactly what your target is seeing, just as if you were searching on their computer. It makes it easy to check up on your ads to make sure they're coming up unaltered in the correct demographics. Geosurf even signs a contract with you binding them to keep your information, even search information, private, so there are never worries on that end, leaving you to snoop on your competitors undetected.

While anyone would probably benefit from it, if you're working out of the U.S., like me, it can be particularly hard to find out what you're up against. Geosurf definitely makes work much easier. No changing settings or running VPN's to find out what's going on in new geo-targets, just change my location to where I want to look and go.
What you're getting is a service that takes all the work out of finding the correct proxies and IP's for your target demographics, and condenses it into a small little toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer (No Chrome or Opera support, but luckily you can use Firefox). No more wasted money tweaking campaigns every day hoping to see an improvement, or throwing away hours trying to figure out who you keep losing those bids to. You can check right away and see exactly who you're going to start sniping traffic from.

Check them out at Geosurf.com! You can start out small with a free trial or one of the cheaper services, without all of the features, and change it up as you find yourself needing more. Their great support answers any questions you have quickly, so you save even more time instead of waiting forever for a response.