Examples of Web Scraping: How are Businesses Using Web Scraping?

Web Scraping can be highly effective. As a result, many businesses rely on web scraping technologies to power their operations. After all, having access to the correct data can reveal valuable information about an industry or competitor. Today, we will look at some of the most common web scraping applications by businesses from various industries.

February 2, 2023

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Data is now more critical than ever. Businesses use it to manage their customer relationships, plan their marketing strategies, and make investments. To have a successful business, companies must know their customers’ wants and needs by tapping into data analytics to create unique experiences for each customer so that they will stay with the company. Web scraping is an art that can provide companies with this opportunity by collecting information from online sources such as websites or social media using automated software scripts.

This article outlines the basics of web data scraping, which includes how businesses use it today and what could be done with better data collection using big data analytics instead of just traditional text-based scraping, which would only give you a limited amount of data about your audience’s preferences.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is collecting data from websites through automated software scripts that copy and paste information from the site into a database. This process typically includes three steps:

First, you must determine if the data source is online in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which a computer can read. If so, then you can scrape it. Second, you need to identify the data fields that will be collected. Third, you must write software scripts using JavaScript or other programming languages to automate the scraping process. Scraping scripts can be run manually on websites as well as scheduled to run daily automatically with web crawlers.

Why do businesses use web scraping?

A big part of web scraping is the ability to scrape highly detailed information that the naked eye can’t see. For example, you could use this automated data collection method to reach an audience with a product or service in a precise location. Data parsing is also very detailed and accurate because it uses software to define its parameters rather than an individual who may miss some information or make errors.

There are many ways you can use collected data from web scraping, such as:

1. Audience Analysis:

Collect demographic information such as age, gender, location, and interests from social media accounts to better target your advertising messages to your customers based on their wants and needs.

2. Lead Generation:

Use your data to find leads that need a product or service you can offer. For example, a roofing company could use web scraping to find people searching online for “roof repair” or “roof replacement” to send coupons or targeted email offers.

3. Product Research:

Use web scraping to collect reviews of your competitors’ products and information about their pricing and availability in retail stores so that you can be better prepared for sales opportunities with your products when you reach the customers at the point of sale.

4. Email Marketing:

Use web scraping to collect website emails sent by a competitor to build your list of potential customers for later sending targeted emails that could be more effective.

5. Sales Intelligence:

Use web scraping to analyze your competitors’ websites and social media accounts, as well as the data on their sales and marketing strategies, so you can use this information to make better purchasing decisions about the products and services you sell.

6. Customer Support:

Use web scraping to collect all customer feedback posted online, such as comments on a review site or social media website, so you can better address customer concerns with your products or services quickly with accurate information.

What Are the Benefits Of Web Scraping For Businesses?

1. Increase Sales:

Use web scraping to help you more effectively reach your customers with the products and services you offer. For example, you could use web scraping to gather data from your competitors’ websites and social media accounts to determine which customers have been interacting with them most frequently. This can help you better decide where to send your offers of new products or services.

2. Decrease Labor Costs:

For companies with multiple agents collecting information for each customer, hiring a software bot using web scraping is often easier than hiring a human agent to collect this information from the website manually. It can also be done by staffing additional employees with the specific job duties of monitoring websites and taking work away from existing staff members.

3. Increase Efficiency:

By using web scraping to collect data from websites automatically, you can save time and money on repetitive tasks that may take a person hour to complete. For example, a company that sells kitchen equipment such as pots and pans could use web scraping to collect the product details that can be inputted into an Excel spreadsheet. Hence, it is easier for salespeople to manage their inventories.

4. Minimize Human Errors:

Businesses can also use web scraping to minimize human errors in formulating products or services. For example, a company may have created a new product, but if they need to know what customers want in terms of colors, they would have to enter each color choice into the software program manually. Scraping data from a website and inputting it into the software can be done automatically with web scraping so the information is accurate and correct.

5. Accessibility:

Because you can use software scripts to scrape all data from a company’s website, you can get any information even if that site does not support your web browser. By using proprietary software scripts that are not available to the general viewing public, which includes having to purchase a client license for each site you want to scrape, you can gather all the information about that company’s products or services without them being aware of it.

6. Address Security Concerns:

If a client is struggling with website security issues, that data can be safely and securely saved on your computer using web scraping tools. You can also use the collected data to create reports and share them with other clients so they can be more prepared when addressing their security needs.

Use Cases Of Web Scraping In Businesses?

1. Retailers Grasp the Market Through E-Commerce and Social Media:

Companies can use web scraping to improve their strategies to reach customers on the internet. For example, a retailer of kitchen gadgets can use web scraping to gather information on competitors’ products and their different offers and promotions to better prepare for upcoming sales.

2. Construction Company Generates Leads Through Building Search Engine Results:

A construction company uses web scraping to gather the information that would make it more cost-effective and accurate in providing new home builders with the data they need to make better decisions about the building projects they have in store for construction companies. It helps them increase their leads by about 1,000,000 per month by gathering this form of all data from Google’s organic search results.

3. Financial Services Company Improves Sales With Website Data:

A financial services company is using web scraping to gather data on their competitors’ websites so they can make more informed decisions about their products and services and know their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Gaining all of this information helps the company increase its market share by about 4% in just six months.

4. Publishing Company Builds Their Business Through Content Management:

A publishing company uses web scraping to gather information to create content management tools, such as WordPress plug-ins and Joomla modules, to better compete with other companies in the market.

Conclusion

If your business is considering purchasing web scraping software or building it in-house, there are several factors you should consider to make the right decision. For example, if you have hundreds of thousands of products to sell on your e-commerce site, you’ll need a large amount of data to provide your customers with the best shopping experience possible. But if the data set you collect is too large, there is a possibility that it will crash and not load properly. It can cause potential customers to abandon their shopping carts and either go to another company’s website or not buy from any company.