Web Scraping Market Research
3 Typical Ways to Use Web Scraping Tools for Marketing …
Web scraping, also known as web crawling, (web) data extraction, data mining, screen scraping, is the process of collecting large amounts of data from the web, then save to a file, database, etc. Let’s dig deeper into web scraping.
It’s estimated that the Internet has doubled in size every year since 2012. So what does this mean? Yes, there’s a lot of data. These data could help you substantially if you know what to do with it. Now the question boils down to how do you collect the data? if you just navigate from site to site, picking the information you want, and then copy and paste it to another file, it would be way too time consuming and tedious although it has been the only choice for a long time before automatic web crawler becomes available. Most people are not technical enough to build a crawler from scratch, neither do they have enough budgets to purchase the data, hence using the web scraping tools (refer to Top 5 Web Scraping Tools Review for more information) like Octoparse for data scraping would be the best choice for an anyone who wants to mine the web for more insights.
Any data visible on the web can be crawled even those websites require login information if you have the credentials. Here’s how most of web scraping tools work: open the web page for browsing, and then automatically extract the selected data from hundreds or thousands of URLs at the same time or in scheduled sequence.
You may ask why. What’s the point, and what are some of the things you can do with these scraped data? My answer is a good decision, strategy or plan made based on the amount of the data you had.
So how can you use web scraping tools? Here are 3 typical ways for marketing decision.
Lead Generation
There are many tactics you could try to generate a lead depending on the nature of your business. Social media, community like Quora, conferences, guest posting, paid ads, lead magnets, etc. And how does web scraping help generate leads?
In essence, a lead can be easily defined as contact details that fits a profile. If you have a new cloud Medical SaaS for anesthesiologists, you need a list of anesthesiologists; if you have a new product that want to persuade all real estate agents to use it, you need their information.
A web scraper could automatically collect the information for you: name, location, city, zip code, phone number, website, etc.
And you could further qualify those leads by searching or filtering the scraped data by keywords, or any other criteria to find your exact personas. So it’s not just leads, it’s qualified leads. That’s a goldmine.
With these scraped contact details, you could build your customer base and keep a steady flow of prospects heading into your sales funnel.
All these information is available online if you know where to look. Two good resources to get the information are Yellowpages and Yelp. Here are the links for you to learn how to scrape the data from these two websites:
Scrape Data from
Scraping Data from Yelp
Market Research
Market research is part of the due diligence for business owners. A web scraper can extract the necessary data into structured formats from market research firms, directories, news sites, and industry blogs. With this, you could gather information about the opportunities, and organize an extensive list of the direct and indirect competition, or the potential customer base (based on your buyer personas) in a given area, and more.
For example, a real estate company could use the scraped auction, sales, and pricing data to keep abreast of market trends and real-time competitive pricing structures.
Search Engine Optimization
If you have a website, no matter what it is, whether it’s a product or a service, whether it’s something everyone could use or designed for a small niche; if you want to promote online and work with data, you need to get more traffic to grow your market.
There are different channels to get traffic, including direct, organic, referral, social, paid. For most of websites, it comes from organic search. There are several ways to boost your organic search traffic, but they all ultimately revolves around search engine optimization (SEO).
Let’s take Octoparse for example and see what you could do with web scraping for SEO management and analysis.
First, we could track the page ranks over time by scraping various search engine results pages for given keywords.
We know that Octoparse is a web scraping tool and I want to know that where Octoparse rank for each targeted keyword with “web scraping”, so I enter targeted keywords to extract the search results (refer to How to Scrape Data by Searching Multiple Keywords on A Website for more information), and export these data into excel. After finding out where Octoparse ranks, I create a chart for the results.
By finding out what ranks before Octoparse, I give up some keywords considering there may be some virtually unbeatable websites.
Second, to rank higher for more exposure and clicks, I turn to direct competition and see what keywords and phrases they’re ranking for and targeting at. A thorough scrape and text analysis of their site content can give me insight into the titles, keywords, descriptions, links.
Then I could take some actions to generate some high quality articles to generate traffic from search engine.
Third, rankings change all the time. I need to keep an eye on the updated data so that I could know whether I’m moving up, moving down, or staying the at the same level. Most of web scrapers provide cloud service to get real-time data. For example, Octoparse Cloud Service enables users to schedule the crawlers to get the updated data over time. You can refer to How To Get Organic Traffic From Search Engine To Your Blog for more traffic generating tips.
There are many other ways to use web scraping tools like job hunting and recruiting, financial planning, etc. I’ve only mentioned a small part but hopefully it would give you some ideas about how to use the scraped data. With large amounts of data available online, you need a simple solution to collect and sift through it.
A scraping tool allows you to benefit from automatic web scraping without having to install anything or learn coding.
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What Is Web Scraping And How Does It Work? | Zyte.com
In today’s competitive world everybody is looking for ways to innovate and make use of new technologies. Web scraping (also called web data extraction or data scraping) provides a solution for those who want to get access to structured web data in an automated fashion. Web scraping is useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn’t have an API, or it does but provides only limited access to the data.
In this article, we are going to shed some light on web scraping, here’s what you will learn:
What is web scraping? The basics of web scrapingWhat is the web scraping process? What is web scraping used for? The best resources to learn more about web scraping
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is the process of collecting structured web data in an automated fashion. It’s also called web data extraction. Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others.
In general, web data extraction is used by people and businesses who want to make use of the vast amount of publicly available web data to make smarter decisions.
If you’ve ever copy and pasted information from a website, you’ve performed the same function as any web scraper, only on a microscopic, manual scale. Unlike the mundane, mind-numbing process of manually extracting data, web scraping uses intelligent automation to retrieve hundreds, millions, or even billions of data points from the internet’s seemingly endless frontier.
Web scraping is popular
And it should not be surprising because web scraping provides something really valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any public website.
More than a modern convenience, the true power of data web scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. ‘Transformative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way some companies use web scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.
The basics of web scraping
It’s extremely simple, in truth, and works by way of two parts: a web crawler and a web scraper. The web crawler is the horse, and the scraper is the chariot. The crawler leads the scraper, as if by hand, through the internet, where it extracts the data requested. Learn the difference between web crawling & web scraping and how they work.
The crawler
A web crawler, which we generally call a “spider, ” is an artificial intelligence that browses the internet to index and search for content by following links and exploring, like a person with too much time on their hands. In many projects, you first “crawl” the web or one specific website to discover URLs which then you pass on to your scraper.
The scraper
A web scraper is a specialized tool designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a web page. Web scrapers vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project. An important part of every scraper is the data locators (or selectors) that are used to find the data that you want to extract from the HTML file – usually, XPath, CSS selectors, regex, or a combination of them is applied.
The web data scraping process
If you do it yourself
This is what a general DIY web scraping process looks like:
Identify the target websiteCollect URLs of the pages where you want to extract data fromMake a request to these URLs to get the HTML of the pageUse locators to find the data in the HTMLSave the data in a JSON or CSV file or some other structured format
Simple enough, right? It is! If you just have a small project. But unfortunately, there are quite a few challenges you need to tackle if you need data at scale. For example, maintaining the scraper if the website layout changes, managing proxies, executing javascript, or working around antibots. These are all deeply technical problems that can eat up a lot of resources. There are multiple open-source web data scraping tools that you can use but they all have their limitations. That’s part of the reason many businesses choose to outsource their web data projects.
If you outsource it
1. Our team gathers your requirements regarding your project.
2. Our veteran team of web data scraping experts writes the scraper(s) and sets up the infrastructure to collect your data and structure it based on your requirements.
3. Finally, we deliver the data in your desired format and desired frequency.
Ultimately, the flexibility and scalability of web scraping ensure your project parameters, no matter how specific, can be met with ease. Fashion retailers inform their designers with upcoming trends based on web scraped insights, investors time their stock positions, and marketing teams overwhelm the competition with deep insights, all thanks to the burgeoning adoption of web scraping as an intrinsic part of everyday business.
What is web scraping used for?
Price intelligence
In our experience, price intelligence is the biggest use case for web scraping. Extracting product and pricing information from e-commerce websites, then turning it into intelligence is an important part of modern e-commerce companies that want to make better pricing/marketing decisions based on data.
How web pricing data and price intelligence can be useful:
Dynamic pricingRevenue optimizationCompetitor monitoringProduct trend monitoringBrand and MAP compliance
Market research
Market research is critical – and should be driven by the most accurate information available. High quality, high volume, and highly insightful web scraped data of every shape and size is fueling market analysis and business intelligence across the globe.
Market trend analysisMarket pricingOptimizing point of entryResearch & developmentCompetitor monitoring
Alternative data for finance
Unearth alpha and radically create value with web data tailored specifically for investors. The decision-making process has never been as informed, nor data as insightful – and the world’s leading firms are increasingly consuming web scraped data, given its incredible strategic value.
Extracting Insights from SEC FilingsEstimating Company FundamentalsPublic Sentiment IntegrationsNews Monitoring
Real estate
The digital transformation of real estate in the past twenty years threatens to disrupt traditional firms and create powerful new players in the industry. By incorporating web scraped product data into everyday business, agents and brokerages can protect against top-down online competition and make informed decisions within the market.
Appraising Property ValueMonitoring Vacancy RatesEstimating Rental YieldsUnderstanding Market Direction
News & content monitoring
Modern media can create outstanding value or an existential threat to your business – in a single news cycle. If you’re a company that depends on timely news analyses, or a company that frequently appears in the news, web scraping news data is the ultimate solution for monitoring, aggregating, and parsing the most critical stories from your industry.
Investment Decision MakingOnline Public Sentiment AnalysisCompetitor MonitoringPolitical CampaignsSentiment Analysis
Lead generation
Lead generation is a crucial marketing/sales activity for all businesses. In the 2020 Hubspot report, 61% of inbound marketers said generating traffic and leads was their number 1 challenge. Fortunately, web data extraction can be used to get access to structured lead lists from the web.
Brand monitoring
In today’s highly competitive market, it’s a top priority to protect your online reputation. Whether you sell your products online and have a strict pricing policy that you need to enforce or just want to know how people perceive your products online, brand monitoring with web scraping can give you this kind of information.
Business automation
In some situations, it can be cumbersome to get access to your data. Maybe you need to extract data from a website that is your own or your partner’s in a structured way. But there’s no easy internal way to do it and it makes sense to create a scraper and simply grab that data. As opposed to trying to work your way through complicated internal systems.
MAP monitoring
Minimum advertised price (MAP) monitoring is the standard practice to make sure a brand’s online prices are aligned with their pricing policy. With tons of resellers and distributors, it’s impossible to monitor the prices manually. That’s why web scraping comes in handy because you can keep an eye on your products’ prices without lifting a finger.
Learn more about web scraping
Here at Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub), we have been in the web scraping industry for 12 years. With our data extraction services and automatic web scraper, Zyte Automatic Extraction, we have helped extract web data for more than 1, 000 clients ranging from Government agencies and Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startups and individuals. During this time we gained a tremendous amount of experience and expertise in web data extraction.
Here are some of our best resources if you want to deepen your web scraping knowledge:
What are the elements of a web scraping project? Web scraping toolsHow to architect a web scraping solutionIs web scraping legal? Web scraping best practices
Using Web Scraping to boost your Marketing strategy
Web Scraping can be used across countless fact, we’ve written quite a bit about the many uses of web today, we want to focus on how web scraping can be used in all, Marketing only becomes more and more data-driven with every passing day. Let’s break down how Marketing professionals can take advantage of web ing an email listEmail as a marketing channel has maintained its prevalence for almost decades now. A good email list that is responsive and converts is nothing short of priceless. As a result, building high-quality email lists is a priority for marketers Scraping can automate and substantially speed up the process of building an email our guide on how to build an email list with web scraping and considerations to make in order to scrape high-quality Content ScrapingContent, another main pillar of modern marketing. Few things can drive constant low-cost traffic to your website than good evergreen how-to articles to support guides, blog posts can put your business on the first page of Google and drive constant traffic and a result, when planning your content strategy, it’s good to know what your competitors have done in the a web scraper, you could build a simple project to scrape all of your competitor blog titles, URLS, Meta Tags and would give you a valuable database of keywords and topics to work off of right out of the gate. Get scraping and get writing! Scraping Twitter dataPeople tweet a metimes, they tweet too much. However, the value of the data hidden within their tweets doesn’t raping social media for sentiment analysis or market analysis is a practice as old and valuable as social media are influencers in your industry tweeting about? What have been your competitor’s most successful tweets? What were those tweets about? These are all valuable insights you can unlock by scraping tweets from Twitter with a web Reddit DataWhat if you want to get insights on entire communities rather than individuals? Luckily, there’s a subreddit for web scraping, you can quickly discover the topics that your target market is interested you have to do is find the right subreddit for the community you are topics often get a high amount of upvotes? What topics are not that popular or get downvoted often? Are any of your competitors actively posting in these subreddits? You can uncover these valuable insights by using a web scraper to scrape reddit Research / Competitor AnalysisWeb Scrapers can also be used to scrape valuable data about your market or example, let’s say you run an eCommerce business selling laptops access to Amazon data on their laptops catalog, including product details, pricing, review scores, delivery details and more would be incredibly could use this data to generate insights on how to position and advertise your product effectively against ’s our guide on how to scrape product data from osing thoughtsIt might sound cheesy, but the list of things you can do with web scraping is almost ’s all about what data you decide to scrape and how you decide to implement go on, fellow marketer, it’s time to get scraping!
Frequently Asked Questions about web scraping market research
What is web scraping for market research?
Web scraping is the process of collecting structured web data in an automated fashion. It’s also called web data extraction. Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others.
How is web scraping used in marketing?
Market Research / Competitor Analysis Web Scrapers can also be used to scrape valuable data about your market or industry. For example, let’s say you run an eCommerce business selling laptops online. … You could use this data to generate insights on how to position and advertise your product effectively against Amazon.Mar 23, 2020
Is it legal to scrape data from websites?
It is perfectly legal if you scrape data from websites for public consumption and use it for analysis. However, it is not legal if you scrape confidential information for profit. For example, scraping private contact information without permission, and sell them to a 3rd party for profit is illegal.Aug 16, 2021
