- 30 June 2023
- by Andrej Fedek
- Blog, Resources & Tips
- 0 Comments
Introduction
Modern problems require modern solutions. Many business owners would agree that gathering and aggregating business-related information is challenging. Although the Internet provides worldwide data access, its abundance makes it hard to extract value. Most US enterprises use data analysis to improve business decision-making, with Germany, UK, and Australia following nearby. These strong economies are examples of how Big Data provides invaluable insights, but how to get it? Web scraping is one of the best innovative tools to streamline data-related business operations. This article overviews five ways your company can benefit from it.
What Is Web Scraping?
Web Scraping is the extraction of data from websites. Although it can be done manually, usually, it refers to an automatic process.
Businesses utilize web scrapers coupled with proxy services to maximize web scraping efficiency. Web scrapers are highly customizable software designed to target specific websites for defined data units. For example, they can gather prices, discounts, product reviews, etc.
Because many websites limit information access to maintain a competitive advantage, web scrapers often use rotating residential proxies to obfuscate the original IP address. They use dozens of proxy servers to target multiple websites simultaneously using a different IP address each time, remaining undetectable.
Now that we know the basics let’s look into what web scraping can offer for businesses.
Market Research
Participating in an extremely competitive e-commerce marketplace is hard without solid data. Bad business planning is one of the most common reasons for failure that can be avoided using scraped data. It’s especially important for growing enterprises and startups susceptible to market dynamics at early stages.
To minimize failure risks, businesses can collect competitors’ product reviews, service ratings, prices, discounts, and other relevant information. Instead of hiring an additional employee to monitor this information manually, web scraping automates the process making it faster, cheaper, and human-error free.
Price Monitoring
This is one of the most common tasks automated by web scraping. Market prices constantly change, and failing to keep up could drive away customers. Startups should set their prices accordingly to the market average. Setting them too low will negatively impact revenue. Simultaneously, higher-than-expected prices reduce the conversion rate.
Setting up an automated price monitoring tool is rather easy for a tech-savvy employee. They should customize web scrapers to target chosen websites using proxy IP addresses and extract price value. This way, businesses can monitor multiple retail and competition sites simultaneously and will be updated on any changes in real-time.
Competition Analysis
Most established brands use sophisticated tools to keep an eye on the competition. Web scraping using JavaScript is an excellent choice, for example. However, it requires additional safety precautions. Firstly, you should never extract private or personally identifiable data—an illegal practice in most countries. The worst Internet privacy scandals involve fraudulent data-gathering techniques, but we’ll get back to it later.
The same applies to competitor data gathering. Sticking to statistical and marketing data, such as revenue or ad campaign analysis, is best. It gives valuable insights into competition success or failure scenarios you can learn from. However, you should refrain from gathering competitors’ user data, whether their consumers or employees. In other words, targeting personal information is considered shady and uncompetitive and could get you in legal trouble.
Otherwise, setting up an automated competitor monitoring system provides outstanding benefits. It helps with pricing, holiday deals, user sentiment analysis, and brand positioning. Remember that others will be scraping your business website, so don’t collect data you wouldn’t share with your competition.
Data Access
The Internet is divided into separate regions with limited access privileges. For example, many US websites are inaccessible to European users due to GDPR laws. Sometimes it prevents access to crucial information limiting global operations.
Web proxies are an effective tool to bypass online information blocks. They obfuscate the user’s original IP address and issue a substitute in a selected region. European citizens can connect to a proxy server in the US and browse the Internet as if they were there.
Global business data access is paramount because most e-commerce platforms draw worldwide players. Combining proxies with web scraping gives you a better idea of localized brand positioning if you plan on entering a foreign market.
Improve SEO tasks
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a great channel to drive organic website traffic without spending extra on paid ads. According to Backlinko data, the first spot in Google SERP enjoys a 27.6% CTR, going down to a few percent in position ten and lower.
Investing in SEO depends on how much effort your competitors have put into securing the top spot. If their SEO strategy is weak, you can build yours and outperform them. On the other hand, you will most likely fail in the short term if they have a professional SEO team, but how do you know that?
You can scrape their website to extract keyword and backlink data. You can target article headings, comments, keyword density, and other metrics to get a good view of their SEO campaign. Use this data to align your SEO tasks accordingly.
Final Word: How to Scrape Web Ethically?
Unethical web scraping could get you into deep water and a potential lawsuit. All businesses are very protective of their secrets and will retaliate if you try to extract them. Here are a few tips on how to avoid unnecessary troubles:
- Scrape only public data. Nobody can stop you from gathering publicly available information. However, gathering data automatically is risky if the data is locked behind a password or a Terms of Service document.
- Inspect the Robot.txt file. Websites issue this file to inform web scrapers of their data-sharing policies. Go through the document to know what’s allowed and what’s prohibited.
- Avoid identifiable data. Gathering personally identifiable data is a privacy violation of the GDPR and CCPA regimen. Avoid gathering first and last names, phone numbers, employment history, pictures, or any other personally identifiable information.
It’s always best to get legal advice regarding online data gathering. However, if you master this technique, it has unique business advantages. Once you set up an automatic web scraping plan, it will provide benefits with little future investment required.
Andrej Fedek is a digital marketer. He recently started his own blog about digital marketing called InterCool Studio. His passion is to help startups grow and thrive in a competitive environment.
