Top Web Scraping Use Cases & Applications in 2022

We have described what a data crawler is as well as why web scraping is important for companies, which depend on data-driven decisions. Web scraping is very important as despite industries, the web has information, which can offer actionable insights for businesses to get benefits over competitors.

In this blog, we concentrate on web scraping applications and use cases from market research to do strategy projects for scraping Machine Learning algorithms.

Data Science & Data Analytics

Data Collection of Machine Learning Training

Different Machine Learning algorithms need a huge data volume to improve output accuracy. Although, collecting a huge amount of precise training data is an enormous pain. Web scraping services may assist data scientists in acquiring the necessary training datasets to get ML models. For instance, GPT-3, which impressed the community of computer science having its faithful text generation was created on the textual content online.

Sales & Marketing

Pricing Intelligence Data Collection

For all pricing elastic products available in the market, setting optimum prices is amongst the most efficient ways of improving revenues. Although competitor pricing requires getting known to regulate the most optimum prices. Companies could also utilize these insights to set dynamic pricing.

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Different data scraping tools could be used to scrape competitors’ price data and it is the most general web scraping use case given by most companies like X-Byte Enterprise Crawling.

A data crawler could be programmed for making requests on different competitor websites’ products pages as well as collecting the prices, shipping data, as well as data availability from a competitor’s website.

One more price intelligence use case is making sure MAP (Minimum Advertised Price). Compliance. Manufacturers could extract retailers’ digital properties for making sure that retailers trail their price guidelines.

Product Data Fetching

Precisely in e-commerce, businesses require to make thousands of product features, images, as well as descriptions, which have already been written by various suppliers for similar products. Web scraping could automate the whole procedure and offer product descriptions and images quicker than humans. Here is an example of scraped product data from e-commerce company websites.

Brand Protection

With web scraping, different brands can quickly recognize online content (e.g. fake products) that can hurt a brand. When this content gets identified, these brands can take any legal action against the persons responsible:

• Counterfeiting: Counterfeiters require to market products as well as scrapers permit businesses to recognize the products before real users as well as stop users from purchasing fake products.
• Copyright Infringement is the usage of copyrighted works without no permission. Data scrapers can assist in identifying if the copyrighted rational property is utilized illegally.
• Patent theft is the illegal manufacturing or selling of approved products.
• Trademark infringement is an illegal usage of a pattern, logotype, phrases, or other elements, which are related to a brand.

Competitive Research

Lead Generation

Efforts of lead generation can assist businesses in reaching extra customers. During this procedure, the marketer begins communicating with applicable leads by sending messages. Data scraping assists in reaching leads by extracting contact data like phone, email, as well as social media.

Lead Prioritization

In ABM (Account-Based Marketing), crawlers are utilized to extract technographic and firmographic data. Those data could be used for prioritizing leads depending on their probability to buy.

Furthermore, signals (e.g. new hires, promotions, M&A, new investments), which are expected to trigger buying can be extracted from company or news announcements. It can assist companies in prioritizing marketing efforts.

Verification of Marketing Communication

Companies spend billions on the distribution of their messages and particularly larger brands should be careful about how the marketing messages are distributed. For instance, YouTube got a problem in 2017 when they showed Fortune 500 links with offensive and hateful videos.

Consumer Sentiment Monitoring

Analyzing consumers’ reviews and feedback can assist businesses in understanding what is lacking in their services and products as well as recognize how competitors separate themselves. Though, there are lots of review aggregator sites, which have hundreds of reviews in all solution categories. Web scraping tools, as well as open-source frameworks, could be used for scraping all the reviews as well as producing insights for improving products and services.

For instance, AIMultiple solutions’ pages comprise a synopsis of insights from online sources, assisting businesses in identifying various products’ weaknesses and strengths.

SEO Keyword Research & Audit

Google considers many factors when ranking websites. Although, search engines offer limited visibility about how they are ranking websites. It results in an industry, which provides insights into how companies could improve their presence online as well as rank higher in search engines.

The majority of SEO tools like Ubersuggest and Moz crawl sites on-demand for analyzing a site’s domain. Different SEO tools use web crawlers to do SEO monitoring for:

• Running SEO audits: Extract their customers’ sites to recognize technical SEO problems (e.g. slower loading times, broken links) as well as suggested improvements
• Analyzing inbound as well as outbound links, recognizing new backlinks
• Scraping search engines for identifying various companies’ web traffic as well as competition in the search engines. This extracting may also assist in generating newer content ideas as well as content optimization chances helping companies’ efforts on keyword research.
• Scraping competitors to recognize their successful tactics considering account factors including word counts of various pages etc.
• Scraping the ranking of your site weekly or annually in the keywords you are challenging. This helps the SEO team in taking immediate actions if any unexpected rank reduction takes place.

Website Testing

Webmasters might utilize web scraping tools for testing the website’s front-end performances as well as functionality after preservation. This allows them to ensure that all the parts of the web interface are working as anticipated. A sequence of tests can assist in identifying new bugs. For instance, tests could be run whenever a tech team adds newer website features or changes elements’ positions.

Public Relation

Brand Monitoring

Brand monitoring consists of crawling different channels to recognize who pointed out your company so that you could respond as well as act on the mentions for serving them better. It can comprise news, complaints, as well as praises on social media.

Data-Driven Portfolio Management

Different hedge funds depend on data for developing superior investment strategies for clients. As stated by Greenwich Associates, the average hedge fund spends approximately $900,000 every year on alternative data sources. Web scraping is known as the biggest resource of alternative data:

Another web scraping sample is scraping as well as aggregating news articles to do predictive analysis. The data could be used for feeding into own Machine Learning algorithms for making data-driven decisions.

Building Products

The objective of MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) is to avoid unnecessary and lengthy work for developing a product having sufficient features to get used by initial customers. Though MVPs might need a larger scale of data to become useful to users and data scraping is the finest way of acquiring data quickly.

Market Research

No market research is possible without data. For academic research of any commercial or professor research on any specific market, data scraping can assist researchers in improving articles with uncovered insights by extracted data. It results in better decisions like entering any newer market or new partnerships.

Support Functions

Finding

The health of any company’s suppliers is very important to the company’s success. Most companies depend on services or software providers to know suppliers’ health. All these companies utilize different approaches to gather company data as well as web data is one more valuable data resource.

HR: Drawing Candidate Data

Different job portals are there like Times Jobs and Indeed where candidates are sharing their business expertise or Resume. A web scraping tool can be used for scraping prospective candidates’ data so that different HR professionals can go through resumes as well as contact candidates, who fit the job description also. Though typically, companies have to make sure that they are not violating T&Cs of any job portals as well as only utilizing public data on candidates and not their NPPI (Non-Public Personal Information).

Artificial Intelligence has important use cases in HR, for instance, automating Resume screening tasks as well as frees up a huge amount of time for the HR team. For instance, candidates’ career development after joining any new company could be associated with their learning background as well as experience in training AI models on recognizing the best candidates. For instance, if those having engineering backgrounds as well as with some years of experience in any marketing agency, can be promoted quickly in the marketing role within a definite industry, which could be important information for forecasting the success of related candidates in similar jobs. Although this approach has important limitations, for instance, Amazon’s recruiting tool was recognized to be influenced since it depends on past data.

Technology

Website Changeover

For companies, which work on a legacy website as well as transfer data to any new platform, it is very important to make sure that all the relevant data gets transferred to any new site. Companies working with legacy websites might not have access to website data in an easily transferable format. Web scraping can scape all relevant data in all legacy websites.

In case, you are searching for a web scraping vendor, then feel free to contact X-Byte Enterprise Crawling or ask for a free quote!

Originally published at https://www.xbyte.io.