Using Proxies in Analyzing User Behavior on Websites

Analyzing user behavior on websites means studying how real people land on pages, what they read, which buttons they click, and where they leave. To perform such analysis correctly and at scale, proxies are often used — intermediary servers through which requests to a website are routed. Proxies make it possible to simulate traffic from different countries and networks, bypass restrictions on frequent requests, collect data from multiple viewpoints, and compare the behavior of “regular” users with automated tools.

The Importance of User Behavior Analysis for Business

• Conversion optimization. Understanding where users “get stuck” in the funnel allows you to optimize pages, forms, and purchase processes, which directly increases sales.
• Personalization. Based on behavioral data, you can offer relevant content and promotions, increasing click-through rates and repeat purchases.
• Churn reduction and retention growth. Analyzing churn patterns (for example, a sudden drop in session length within a specific cohort) helps you respond in time and manage promotions, product changes, or UX improvements.
• Product management and prioritization. Data on which features are used and which are ignored helps inform product development decisions and resource allocation.
• Marketing optimization. Understanding user journeys makes it possible to more accurately assess the effectiveness of acquisition channels and adjust advertising budgets.
• Anomaly and fraud detection. Behavioral analysis helps identify suspicious activity and protect the platform.
• User experience (UX) improvement. Metrics and click maps provide concrete insights for interface redesign.
• Data-driven decision support. High-quality analytics turns intuition into measurable hypotheses and A/B tests.

Objectives of User Behavior Analysis

The objectives of user behavior analysis come down to understanding how people move from their first visit to a website to a target action, and identifying the points where this journey breaks.

• In practice, analytics helps identify typical action sequences, pinpoint bottlenecks in the sales funnel, and test ways to eliminate them through A/B experiments. It is used to segment audiences by visit frequency, traffic sources, and behavioral patterns in order to personalize content and advertising offers.
• At the product development level, behavioral data shows which features are actually used and which are ignored, helping to prioritize the product roadmap and allocate resources.
• Analysis is also essential for evaluating LTV and retention. Cohort patterns can be used to predict churn and launch preventive measures.
• Behavioral analysis serves UX improvement purposes. Heatmaps, click maps, and scrolling sequences provide practical guidance for page redesigns and interface simplification.

To solve all these tasks, various metrics and methods are used: funnels and conversion rates, time on site and depth of view, bounce rate, action sequence analysis, cohort analysis, as well as behavioral machine learning and feature engineering for recommendation systems and predictive models.

The Role of Proxy Servers in Data Collection and Processing

• Proxies expand technical capabilities for obtaining a representative and scalable sample of behavioral signals. They allow you to emulate access to a website from different geographic locations and networks, which is important when testing localized content, pricing, or regional A/B experiments.

• When regularly scanning large numbers of pages and simulating many sessions, proxies help avoid blocks and request-rate limits. A proxy pool with IP rotation and session management makes it possible to distribute load and simulate different users.

• In data collection infrastructures, proxies are involved at the extraction stage: crawlers and headless browsers use a pool, apply different settings, and collect pages and sequences. The collected data then goes through cleaning and normalization. Proxy infrastructure can also perform preliminary filtering or response caching, reducing the load on the main pipeline and simplifying further processing and feature generation for analytics and ML models.

Technical Aspects of Using Proxies

Proxy Types

By type, proxies are divided into three categories: datacenter, residential, and mobile.

• Datacenter proxies are the cheapest and fastest, but websites often recognize them as non-typical traffic and may block them.
• Residential proxies use IP addresses of home users, making them look more realistic and less likely to be blocked, but they are more expensive and slower.
• Mobile proxies provide IPs from mobile carriers and are as close as possible to real mobile traffic behavior, but they cost more and have higher latency.

Configuration

You can read about how proxies work and how to configure them in our article. Here, we will share a few tips to consider during setup.

• At a basic level, it’s important to take care of authentication, DNS, and browser emulation. Providers usually offer login/password authentication or IP whitelists, while DNS settings determine where domains are resolved — locally or through the proxy.
• For correct geolocation, DNS should preferably be resolved through the proxy. For realistic behavior, cookies should be stored separately for each “virtual” session, and different user-agent strings should be used; otherwise, the site can easily detect that the visitor is not a real user.
• When working over HTTPS, don’t forget to verify certificate validation and proper TLS operation.

Request Rate Management and Load Distribution

• Request rate control is necessary to avoid blocks. You should not send many parallel requests from the same IP. Datacenter proxies can handle a higher number of concurrent connections, while residential and mobile proxies are better limited to one to three parallel connections per IP.

• Adaptive behavior works better than hard limits. For example, if error rates like 429 or 403 increase, try reducing request frequency, applying exponential backoff, and adding small random delays between requests to make behavior look more natural. First test acceptable rates on a small page sample, then scale up.

• Proxy pool management and load distribution are handled through segmentation and automatic health checks. Proxies should be tagged with metadata such as country, provider, latency, and type, and requests should be routed according to this metadata.

• Load distribution is typically handled by task balancers that control the number of concurrent requests, respect IP quotas, and apply routing algorithms based on proxy quality.

Business Use Cases

Behavioral Pattern Research

Analysts study which pages most often lead to bounces, where users abandon carts, and which interface elements prevent checkout completion. Based on this data, A/B tests are conducted, product cards are optimized, forms are simplified, and upsell strategies are refined.

Proxies are needed here when it’s necessary to simulate real users from different regions or devices, test multi-session scenarios (for example, adding an item to a cart after an IP change), or collect behavioral sequences across a large number of pages without risking blocks.

Interaction Analysis on News Portals

On news portals and blogs, the focus is on content interaction: which articles hold attention, which headlines and formats lead to the longest reading time or newsletter sign-ups, and how viewing depth is distributed across audience segments.

Proxies help check how content is displayed for readers from different countries and mobile carriers, identify media delivery issues, and collect click sequences across large page volumes without triggering protection mechanisms. This is important for editorial decisions — for example, understanding which materials should be promoted via paid channels or which formats monetize better in specific regions.

Advertising Campaign Optimization and Audience Segmentation

These activities largely depend on accurate data about how users arrive at a site and what they do next. User path analytics helps identify which sources drive real conversions, which campaigns bring low-quality traffic, and where budgets should be reallocated. Behavioral data is used to build retargeting segments and look-alike audiences, as well as to personalize ad creatives.

Proxies are useful for validating advertising channels and checking creative delivery across different geographies, helping avoid wasted budgets on non-performing placements and enabling more accurate ROI assessment.

Verifying Website Functionality Across Regions

A separate operational task. You need to ensure that localization, currencies, shipping rules, and legal texts are displayed correctly; that promotions and regional A/B tests are properly targeted; and that prices and offers are shown to the intended users.

Proxies allow you to “view” a website from the IP address of a target country and verify that content is localized, design elements and payment flows work correctly, and personalized blocks (ads, recommendation widgets) match the region.

Ethical and Legal Aspects

When you use proxies for data collection, you are essentially viewing a website “through someone else’s eyes.” Improper or careless use of proxies can harm real users: violate their privacy, create vulnerabilities for those whose networks are used for proxying requests, or cause website owners to lose trust in your company. In addition, there are legal implications — different countries have data protection regulations, and violations can result in fines and serious business issues.

Proxy usage should be careful and lawful. Clients, partners, and users want assurance that their data is handled responsibly. If you indiscriminately collect data, store personal information unnecessarily, or use questionable proxy providers, it can lead to data leaks, complaints, and customer loss. It is far easier and cheaper to do everything honestly and cautiously from the very beginning.

Practical Recommendations

• When choosing proxies, it’s important to understand which type you need (residential proxies are banned less often, datacenter proxies are cheaper and faster, mobile proxies suit specific tasks), and to ensure that geographic coverage matches your needs, since country and city availability directly affects data accuracy.

• You should also evaluate latency and proxy speed, because low ping and fast loading are critical when handling large request volumes.

• Pay attention to rotation capabilities and support for sticky sessions.

• Pool size and IP uniqueness. A small pool increases the risk of repeated blocking.

• Make sure the service supports the required protocols (HTTP/HTTPS and/or SOCKS5), provides reliable authentication methods (such as login/password or IP whitelisting), and offers encryption.

If you haven’t found a suitable proxy service yet, take a look at Belurk. Our proxy pool and geographic coverage are broad enough for analytics across multiple countries. Flexible rotation settings and sticky sessions are available, making them convenient for scraping and analytical scenarios. Required protocols are supported, and there is an API for integration and test automation. Moreover, Belurk proxies are reliable and secure, providing protocol encryption, leak protection, stable uptime, and responsive support.