Web data extraction is not just limited to unveiling hidden patterns from voluminous data available on the internet and compiling it in an excel sheet. It can help you grow your business by improving your decision-making acumen. However, with the exponential rise in web data year after year, it becomes important to keep an eye on the quality and quantity of data being extracted from disparate web sources. Otherwise, it will become challenging to extract insights and other valuable business information.
The tools for web data extraction or web harvesting have been around for many years, however, only a few companies are using them. Do you know why? Many of them require you to opt for premium plans that begin soon after a short free trial period. Also, some of them are not trustworthy and don’t provide accurate results.
Though you can also manually scrape data from different websites to your local server, it is time-consuming, tiring and inconvenient when you have to extract data from tens of thousands of websites. Therefore, it makes sense to opt for data extraction services. Hiring a dedicated expert not only reduces the turnaround time for data extraction but also validates the data being extracted to improve accuracy. Besides this, you get the freedom to invest your productive time in other crucial business functions. Now, let’s take a look at some real-life applications of web data scraping.
1. Market research
No amount of data can predict the growth of your business for the next quarter unless you know how to carry out market research. With over 1.5 billion websites on the internet today, it’s a clear indication that hiring a web scraping professional is the best possible means for market research. Let the experts do market research for you by extracting data from disparate websites and collate it in one place for easy analysis.
2. Competitor analysis
Gone are the days when monitoring competition was a challenging task for businesses. Today, you can make the most of web scraping and keep an eye on your competitors. By hiring a data scraping expert, you can get a detailed report of your competitors’ activities like the email campaigns or sponsored ads they are running, media agencies they are reaching out to for marketing, social media strategies they are practicing, and other related activities. Embracing your competitors’ strategies could help you in improving your brand presence and credibility on the internet.
3. Price monitoring
Pricing plays a vital role in eCommerce sales. Today, many eCommerce store merchants leverage web data extraction to fetch real-time pricing data of their competitors. This helps them adjust their product pricing and stay competitive. With the phenomenal rise of eCommerce stores in the last few years, it has become imperative for online retailers to track and monitor the pricing of their competitors in real-time.
4. Brand reputation monitoring
Considering the exponential rise of competition in the online space, it is important for every business to have a clean reputation for survival and growth. Today, most of the businesses are hiring web scraping experts who can monitor their brand presence on social media, forums, and customer reviews and ratings sites. This helps them in engaging with their customers and fixing the issues they are facing. In other words, addressing the challenges faced by your customers gives you the upper hand.
5. Product cataloging
You must have seen tens of thousands of product listings in an eCommerce store. As a store merchant, it’s practically not possible to update such a massive amount of product catalogs single-handedly. That’s why many store owners rely on web data extraction services for data extraction. Once the data is extracted, it is tweaked and updated to utilize it on a new eCommerce store. This not only saves a good amount of time but also helps merchants from the hassle of writing fresh descriptions for all the products. Remember, when it comes to product description writing, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
6. Business information extraction
Web data scraping can also be helpful in compiling an exhaustive list of manufacturers, suppliers, and exporters of a product. If you are running short of time, you can seek help from a data harvesting expert to extract the crucial business information including emails, phone numbers, and contact addresses from diverse websites.
7. Content aggregation
Media houses have to stay abreast of the trending topics or the latest news on the internet. Reporting breaking news at the earliest is a huge crowd pulling factor for them. To stay up-to-date with the trending topics or keywords, media agencies make use of web data scraping to pull the latest information for them from social media, forums, and user-generated content sites.
Wrapping Up
Today, every business, irrespective of the industry, is embracing a data-driven approach. Follow suit. Determine your data needs and start considering data extraction services to extract meaningful data, which can drive your business growth. If you are looking for skilled professionals for web data extraction, connect with our experts by dropping an email to info@dataentryindia.in.