Information is the most valuable commodity in the world. But in order to gain information, you need data! Unfortunately, all the abundant data on the internet is not open and available for download. So, Web scraping is the ultimate way to collect this data. Data once collected can be further analyzed to get valuable insights into almost everything! We have listed down 5 business benefits that businesses can leverage with ethical web scraping, but before that let’s see why web scraping is the need of the hour!
Do you know how difficult life will be if there was no concept of data scraping? Let’s take an example - John is a happy man today. He came back home with a 100% job satisfaction and bragged about how productive his day at the office was! He successfully managed to find heaps of crucial information that his company was in the utmost need of and spent days copy-pasting them following a format. It was incredible. He expected to see happy faces at work the next day! But, Alas! When he reached office the next day, his boss was furious! What went wrong, he asked? Well, he entered an incorrect trade that resulted in the firm incurring a huge loss. To err is human!
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Whenever we need information, we turn towards the magic box: the Internet. Information is so readily available nowadays that finding reliable information can take place in minutes. With so many informative websites accessible right at our fingertips, learning new information is just a matter of wish. You copy and paste, simple! But, abundant data does not serve the purpose, when we require structured information or when we have to waste manual labor and hours of our time to copy paste those information and still go to sleep at night with the fear of human errors creeping up the next day! That’s why you need data scraping.
Also read - What to keep in mind before custom developing a web scraper?
Now coming straight to the point, How web scraping benefits your business? As an entrepreneur that is the target question: “What significant value does it provide to my firm and why should I spend any penny on it?” Well, read on - the 5 benefits of data scraping.
[1] Scrape Products & Price For Competitive Analysis
There are factorially 100 times more products that are sold on ecommerce channels than the human population. Imagine having access to all these data in a spreadsheet or database and that also in real time. Data scraping can do that for you! Influence consumer-buying decisions with the help of Data-Driven Pricing Strategy and attract price-sensitive customers by setting prices of the products they surf through lower than the market base price and optimize revenue in the process. Also, get to monitor products with data scraping for change in the stock count and availability to leverage that to your benefit.
Also read - Data scraping: How to leverage it for your eCommerce business?
[2] Gain Leads
The most fundamental requirement for lead generation is information collection, correct, up-to-date information. Enter, web scraping! Most data on the internet is unstructured. You know which industry and niche your competitors belong to, so, develop a web scraping tool to scrape your competition’s social accounts, community portals, forums, and other online platforms to see who’s following and engaging with them and what they are talking about. Web scraping tools can help to acquire leads, build an email database, scrape reviews and then export all data to CRM or database - making life much much simpler!! Also, Recruiting companies can use web scraping to get an idea of what new talent their competitors are looking to hire. Web scraping bots can collect data from job aggregation sites and arrange them in the necessary format to get an upper hand.
[3] Brand Monitoring
The “Brand” of a company carries a significant worth. What it means in layman’s terms is strategically monitoring social media and other channels to discover what is being talked about your company, products, customer service and anything explicitly connected to your business.
Data scraping can fetch all these data from various channels to help executives monitor and measure and track their success over time. It helps you draw comparisons of your competitors, analyze the vast sea of tweets and blog posts and distill them to a list of actionable insights (social media monitoring analytics).
[4] Search Engine Results For SEO Tracking
Whether you are an established entrepreneur or just starting out, I’m sure you have heard of the term SEO. The main aim of Search Engine Optimization is to increase website traffic and convert visitors to leads. With the help of web scraping, you can quickly collect heaps of data to get an idea of what keywords they are optimizing, what PPC ads they are running, what kind of content they are posting, in short, get a rough idea of what they are up to. Once you have the data, you can analyze and draw inferences and then come up with strategies that best suit your niche.
[5] Sentiment Analysis
Any idea, what is the biggest repository of customer opinions? Yup, as you guessed it - Online review sites. Every day thousands of users post their experiences with products and services on these sites. This huge amount of data is publicly available and can easily be scraped to gain insights into business, competitors, potential opportunities and trends. Web scraping along with NLP (Natural Language Processing) can also let businesses know how customers are reacting to their products and services and uncover what their feedbacks are on products, services campaigns.
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Parting Words
Sales are critical for any business. Web scraping is essential for businesses as it fuels sales. Your job shouldn’t be cleaning and building databases containing potential information of leads and competition but turning those leads to customers. Web scraping, when executed correctly can extract key data that will help any organization take optimum financial and marketing decisions.
