Guess what’s common between an entrepreneur envisaging a new start-up, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, an equity analyst, a marketer, and a journalist?
Well, they all derive their strategies and insights from data!
It is the core of market research and business strategies.
However, before we take a plunge into it, let’s just quickly understand a bit about web scraping.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website. This information is collected and then exported into a format that is more useful for the user. Be it a spreadsheet or an API.
Applications of Web Scraping
Competition analysis
Track your niche competitors by scraping their prices :
- Scrape product information from competitors’ websites, make a timely response to a new product launch, and discover a new market strategy.
- Scrape product/service ads. Make insights into their budgets.
- c. You can also use Hotel APIto track your niche competitors. This API can provide you prices from multiple vendors.
- Scrape social media channels. Analyse their audience and discover potential customers.
- Predict the fashion trend and stay competitive.
Price Monitoring
Here is how web scraping comes into play in Price monitoring:
- Scrape customer information, and find out how you can bring up their satisfaction by fine-tuning your market strategies.
- Next, make a dynamic pricing strategy. The market is not static, and your pricing should keep up with the changes to maximize the profit. Web scraping enables you to keep tabs on changes in market price and promotion events in a timely manner.
- Hotel Price APIand Flight API can help you to monitor the hotel & flight prices respectively. Using these APIs you can even generate discounts and set prices accordingly.
Lead Generation
You can extract leads’ contact information online from millions of websites within a short time span for free!
- Set your target persona: education, company, job title, etc. You can scrape Linkedinto collect valuable information
- Find relevant websites on your niche: physicians on health care providers; restaurants from Yellowbook.com; key opinion leaders from reputable open-source medical websites.
Investment analysis
Investment decisions are complex, as it usually involves a series of the process before a sound decision can be made from setting up a hypothetical thesis, experimenting, to researching. The most effective way to test an investment thesis is through historical data analysis. It allows you to gain insights into the root cause of past failures or successes, pitfalls you should have avoided, and future investment returns you might gain.
As a means, web scraping extracts historical data more effectively, of which you can feed such data into some machine learning database for model training. As a result, investment firms, using big data, improves the accuracy of the analysis result for better decision making.
Optimization of Products
You can analyse the mood of the buyer by analysing the reviews. You can analyse the reviews by scraping all the old reviews. Reviews affects the buying decision.
Let’s say your product team is about to launch a new product. You are so anxious, wondering if it can make a breakthrough. It is important to collect customers’ feedback to cross-examine your product and make improvements. The sentiment analysis technique is widely used to analyse customers’ attitudes, whether it is positive, neutral, or negative. However, the analysis needs a considerable amount of data, in text, from many websites to function. Web scraping can automate the extraction process faster which saves tons of time and effort for such mundane work.
Conclusion
The above are only a fraction of what web scraping can achieve. You can build a web crawler to extract the data we described above . Or you can use web scraping API to scrape any web page. Don’t underestimate the power of web scraping. It is the best solution for businesses to obtain a large volume of the necessary information in a routine fashion. You deserve to focus all the energy on important business operations. We are here to help you get the data you need. Let’s discuss how to implement web scraping for good prosperity.