How to Detect VPNs, Proxies and Datacenter IPs
How a datacenter IP differs from a residential or mobile one, why detecting VPNs and proxies in ad traffic matters, and how ASN-based detection works.
Not every IP is equally "alive." Residential and mobile addresses belong to ISPs and carriers — real users sit behind them. Datacenter addresses belong to hosting providers and clouds — servers, bots, VPNs and proxies sit behind those. For advertising, that is the difference between a buyer and junk.
How ASN tells them apart
Every IP belongs to an autonomous system (ASN) — the operator of a block of addresses. Databases like MaxMind GeoLite2-ASN reveal who owns an address: if it is AWS, Google Cloud, OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and the like, it is almost certainly a datacenter, not a live user.
VPNs and most proxy services also run inside datacenters, so an ASN filter catches them at the same time. Residential proxies are trickier, but they are expensive and show up far less often in mass fraud.
Why it matters for advertising
A datacenter click almost never converts, yet it still lands in your stats and skews your metrics. By separating datacenter and proxy traffic from residential and mobile, you get honest CPA and ROI and avoid optimizing toward traffic that will never buy.
In short
ASN detection is the basic, reliable way to separate datacenters, VPNs and proxies from live networks. The key is a fresh database, because ranges change over time. In ClickConv the ASN check is built in and runs on every single visit.
ClickConv — трекер, клоака и конверсии Google Ads в одной платформе.
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