Guess whatâs common between an eCommerce business owner, a researcher, and a marketer?
Well, they all derive their strategies and insights from data!
Data is the new differentiator. It is the core of market research and business strategies. Whether you want to start a new project or churn out a new strategy for an existing business, you need to invariably access and analyze a vast amount of data. This is where web scraping comes in.
In this article, weâll take a look at how data scraping can be used to grow your business.Â
What is data scraping?
Data scraping, also known as web scraping, is a technique to extract huge volumes of data from websites where regular-format data can be detected and processed into easy-to-read structured formats.
There are numerous reasons why businesses and individuals scrape data from websites. In this article, we have listed some common data scraping use case examples.
Web Scraping UsesÂ
Price monitoring in E-commerce
Today many companies sell things on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, BestBuy, Walmart, etc. To gather product information by manually copying and pasting data to files is an impossible mission because there are hundreds of thousands of web pages. This is where the data scraping technique comes in. With data scraping skills, businesses are able to monitor all this data effectively. They are able to scrape the prices, brands, and customer reviews of products from the competitors for price comparison. After data collection and analysis, you can easily adjust your business strategies or plan promotional campaigns.
Scrape search results for paper research
Data is a crucial part of science and legitimate academic research. Data scraping techniques help you gather sources and processes into visual data. You donât have to do any tedious job which probably takes hours or even days to complete. Suppose you want to do research that requires data from social media channels. Itâs difficult to gather the results one by one. Data scraping tools solve this problem by automating the process of extracting data from social media networks, forums, and blogs/news sites.
Lead generation from directories
Data scraping allows you to gather contact information of businesses and individuals from Yellowpages, Yelp, Crunchbase, and other similar websites. Detailed contact information such as emails, telephone numbers, and addresses can be extracted easily from data scraping tools.Â
ConclusionÂ
Above are just a few scenarios where data scraping is used in some industries. It is also commonly seen in collecting news articles, government records, health-care information, financial information, real estate listings, etc.
Web scraping has been widely used in all kinds of industries, and it is also becoming increasingly clear that those who will make creative and advanced use of web scraping tools will race ahead of others and gain a competitive advantage.
So leverage web scraping to make the best of your web data and boost your business now!
