Targeting by country, city, or ASN: how to reach the exact location you need

Prices, search results, ads, stock availability — a surprising amount of the web changes based on where it thinks you are. If you are collecting any of it, the location you appear to come from is not a detail. It is the measurement. Get it wrong and you are recording a distorted version of what a real local visitor would see.

Targeting is how you set that location on purpose instead of taking whatever you are handed. The good news is that it is simpler than it looks, because one rule covers the entire system.

One rule: it all goes in the username

Every targeting choice lives in a single place — your username — as dash-separated parameters. Your password, endpoint, and port never change. So the plain connection you already use becomes a precisely targeted one by editing a single field:

<username>-country-<cc>[-state-<name>][-city-<name>][-asn-<number>][-session-<id>][-ttl-<minutes>]

Parameters in brackets are optional; drop any you do not need. Keep them in the order shown. The base username is the one displayed in your dashboard, and the full string plugs into the same shape as always: http://<username-with-parameters>:<password>@<endpoint>:<port>.

You never touch the password to change location. If you find yourself editing anything but the username, you are overcomplicating it.

Country: the workhorse

-country-<cc> takes a two-letter ISO code — us, de, gb, jp — and it is available on every rotating product. This alone covers most jobs: see a site as a US visitor, verify a campaign as if you were in Germany, check prices from Japan. In its simplest form, it looks like this:

curl -x "http://user123-country-us:[email protected]:10000" https://api.ipify.org

One note on rotation: on Budget Unlimited, a port holds its IP until your configured rotation interval elapses. If you want a different IP on every call, send a fresh -session- value with each request instead.

State and city: when national is not enough

Some data only makes sense locally — regional pricing, city-level availability, the local results a search engine shows someone in a specific metro. For that you go narrower, using full state names with underscores for multi-word values. On Residential / ISP the state flag is -region-; on Premium Unlimited it is -state-:

curl -x "http://user123-country-us-region-california-city-los_angeles:[email protected]:20228"

City and state targeting live on Premium Unlimited and Residential / ISP — the tiers built for granular geography.

ASN: reach a specific network

Sometimes the axis is not the place, it is the network. -asn-<number> routes through a specific carrier or ISP by its ASN — -asn-7018, for example, is AT&T. This is a Residential / ISP capability, and it earns its keep when a target treats traffic differently depending on the network it arrives on, or when you are validating something carrier-specific:

curl -x "http://user123-country-us-asn-7018-session-job42-ttl-30:[email protected]:20228"

Session and TTL: hold a location, or rotate through it

By default, IPs rotate on every request. When a task needs to stay on one address — a checkout flow, a login, any multi-step sequence — add -session- followed by any string you like. The same session string returns the same IP; change it or drop it to rotate to a fresh one. -ttl- sets how long that IP is held, in minutes, not seconds: -ttl-30 holds it for half an hour, -ttl-1440 for a full day. Maximum sticky durations vary by product. There is a fuller treatment of the trade-off in rotating or sticky.

What each product can actually target

Not every product accepts every parameter, and this matters: asking for one a product does not support rejects the whole username rather than quietly ignoring the extra. Match your ambition to the plan:

• Budget Unlimited — country, session, ttl. Shared, country-level.
• Premium Unlimited — country, state, city.
• Residential / ISP — the full set: country, state, city, and ASN.
• Mobile — country only, on real 4G/5G carrier IPs.
• IPv6 — country only.
• Static ISP — no username parameters at all. Each of your ports (30000–30099) is already a fixed, dedicated US IP, so you choose location by choosing the port rather than by editing the username.

Read practically, that means city or ASN precision points you at Premium or Residential / ISP, and a single unchanging US IP points you at Static ISP.

Let the dashboard write it for you

You rarely need to assemble these by hand. The proxy-list generator in your dashboard builds the username strings for you: pick a country, state, city, ASN, and session options, and it produces ready-to-paste lists in the format you need. Hand-editing is there for when you want fine control, not a tax you have to pay on every request.

Targeting comes down to one field and one rule: the username carries the location, and everything else stays exactly where it is. Start with -country-, add -state- and -city- or -asn- when the job calls for it, and reach for -session- when you need an IP to sit still. The precision is already in the network — the syntax just lets you ask for it. The full reference lives in the targeting docs.