Web Scraping For Market Research
The internet is a vast mine of publicly available data, and this dataset has been exponentially increasing since its invention in 1983. The data available on the internet serves various purposes like Market Research, Analysis, etc.
But how do you extract this data? If you manually navigate to each site and collect the data, you might end up wasting your valuable time and resources. Remember, Time is equivalent to Money. Humanity has been finding solutions to its problems throughout history. To automate this process, web scraping comes into play.
Web Scraping is the procedure of extracting vast amounts of publicly available data from the web. Publicly Available is the critical term here. Web Scraping can be a resource-intensive process, but if done correctly, it can result in the collection of vast amounts of quality data.
In this article, we will get you through some benefits of web scraping for market research, and at the end, we will learn through some points how web scraping helps in the survival of the market research industry.
Benefits of Using Web Scraping Tools For Market Research
Web Scraping has made many things possible with exceptional efficiency and convenience. It finds its applications for various purposes like market research, data analysis, lead generation, and other relevant functionalities.
But, it is easier to use a web scraping tool instead of manually extracting data from the websites, which consumes a considerable amount of time. Ideally, you get the following advantages of you use a web scraping tool or an API to scrape data:
1. Fast and Efficient – Using web scraping tools or APIs allows you to automate the process of scraping data from the web, allowing users to scrape the data even without waiting for the website to load.
2. Real-time data – Web Scraping APIs and tools enable you to scrape real-time information from the web, which helps businesses to keep their database up-to-date with current situations.
3. Accuracy – Scraping data manually can lead to degradation in the accuracy of data due to human error. However, utilizing a web scraping API can get your data from the target website with the maximum possible accuracy.
4. Consistency – APIs and tools ensure that you get data without any hindrance and outages, which can happen due to various reasons like the high amount of traffic on the server.
Overall, these were just a few examples of how a web scraping tool or an API can enhance data quality, accuracy, consistency, and data-driven decision capabilities of businesses across various industries in the market.
Let us discuss how web scraping helps us in different aspects of market research.
Lead Generation
For businesses, expanding their business requires them to target new customers. They can use various strategies to identify and target them. One of the strategies is Lead Generation. Lead Generation helps you to gain competitive leverage in the market. However, the question arises, how do you generate them?
A lead can be defined as a person’s contact details including name, email, job position, etc. For example, if you are running a rank-tracking company, and you need a list of all CEOs with their emails in the SEO industry of New York to target them, then you need help from web scraping.
Web Scraping can automate the process of collecting leads for you, and you can further filter those extracted leads on specific criteria. So, you end up with the most quality leads having a high probability of your potential customers.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most essential components of market research. Ignoring SEO would create a challenge in the smooth expansion of your business. Whether you run an e-commerce website, saas product, blogging page, etc., it is always important to grow your organic traffic to stand in the competitive market.
Your website can have various traffic sources, but quality traffic will only take the entry from the website indexing on the search engine. Various dedicated Google Search APIs available in the market enable you to monitor your rankings for particular keywords on the search engine’s page. It will allow you to gather the data in bulk instead of checking website rankings manually.
Google’s algorithm keeps changing regularly, which sometimes affects your website rankings drastically. So, it is always important to keep an eye on real-time data to stay up-to-date with the current conditions.
Competitor Analysis
Many businesses follow an orthodox way of making decisions instead of any research on the data. This exposes their business to the risk of real disruption.
Embracing web scraping as data-driven decision-makers can help businesses to maximize their revenues and increase their market share and organic growth. It will help them to gain valuable insights from the market and surpass any major competitor to employ a firm stand in the market.
As the popularity of web scraping grows, more and more companies will employ web scraping as a decision-making tool. This will result in the availability of accurate information, rapid decisions, and competitive leverage in the market.
Price Monitoring
The e-commerce industry has been growing consistently for the past years and now accounts for one-fifth of global retail transactions. The continuous expansion of the e-commerce industry will invite new competitors and startups who can bring revolutionary innovation to this market.
To ensure profitability, it is essential to have an idea of the competitor’s pricing strategy. By web scraping pricing data, retailers can place their products at such a price in the market that attracts customers while maintaining a competitive edge in the market.
Economic conditions and other factors are responsible for rapid changes in the pricing of products, so businesses need to give importance to real-time data while also looking for past pricing trends to predict any future opportunity.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned some basic points on why web scraping is an effective tool for market research. We also learned how web scraping helps in different aspects of market research like Price Monitoring, SEO, Lead Generation, etc. Overall, web scraping’s ability to extract and analyze a vast amount of data can help businesses to achieve consistent growth and a competitive edge in today’s market.
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