If you have a business in 2018, you should consider ethically collecting data about your customers and your industry. Why? Because relevant data helps you see the big picture of your competitors, your customers and how your industry operates. With high-quality data, you’ll be able to make informed decisions. Decisions that will make your business more successful – and profitable – in both the short- and long- term.

PC: Freepik

The internet has made it easy to collect publically available, relevant data for your business. Online – you can find what customers like and don’t like, what your competitors are doing, what’s popular and trending, and what’s failing.

But the internet is a vast place. Collecting data on the internet by visiting each and every website and copy-pasting your desired information manually can take hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It’s an impossible task.

A solution exists in the form of a service known as data crawling or web scraping.

A data crawling service scans websites on the internet to collect data that you assign it to collect. And it’s a million times faster at finding and storing this data than a human. You can use a web scraping service to collect useful data like prices, product names, customer reviews and much much more.

And it’s worth noting that these data scraping services are completely legal. Since the introduction of GDPR, you can safely assume that the data scraping service you choose will be GDPR compliant. They will only collect data that’s legal and/or publically available.

With that being said, let’s look at a few use cases where data scraping can be useful for your business. Knowing this will help you identify when web crawling services can be ideal for your business – and when to hire them to collect data for you.

Data Analysis

If you own a business and are the person in charge, you know how important it is to consistently make the right decisions. But today, you can’t do that just based on your ‘gut’ or your ‘expertise’.

You need quantifiable data. For example:

Which months do we sell the most products? Which months are the slow business or which months are fast?
Who are our customers? What age? Which city and country? On average, how much do they spend?
What’s the best selling product? What’s the worst selling product? What products are people searching for we don’t have?

Answering these questions requires data. And using data crawling services is the fastest way to get this data at an affordable cost. You can then use the data you’ve gathered to create graphs and visualizations to help you identify trends and patterns. Through this, you will get valuable information you can use to make data-driven decisions in your business.

And what will be the result? Huge boosts in growth, sales, revenue, and profits!

Company Development

There’s a ton of data on the internet you can use to make better decisions about your company. And data crawling makes it easy to collect that data. To show what’s possible, here’s what kind of information you can get with data crawling:

Competitor SEO Strategy: Getting ranked on Google is the best way to get new customers. With data crawling services, you can scrape the websites of your top competitors that rank high on Google and uncover the keywords and links they’re using.
Customer Reviews: Customers leave feedback all the time. You can scrape competitor websites, social media services and forums to find comments with your store’s mention on it. With this data, you’ll get insight into what customers think about your online store. And you can use this feedback to improve your services accordingly.
Product Inventory Audit: People love choices when they’re shopping. That’s why it’s important you have a wide variety of trending products in your store. To find out what products your store doesn’t have that’s in the market, you can scrape competitor websites and collect their product inventory list. This is the easiest way to find new products to put on your online store (that people will love).
Target Audience Data: Many people will ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your competitors after buying from them. You can scrape social media sites and find out who their followers are. In addition, you can collect data regarding what kind of posts your competitors are creating on social networks to engage their customers. This kind of information will help you find your target audience and to create your own marketing strategy.

Social media scraping, product inventory list scraping and keyword scraping are just a few of the many kinds of information you can easily get through data crawling. And once you do, you’ll be more informed about what steps you can take to grow your company and get ahead of competitors.

Price Wars

“What’s the right price point? Which ‘number’ will help us maximize our sales and profits? Which price point will make us lose our customers”? Prices, without a doubt, is the number one metric every business in a hyper-competitive market obsesses about. And rightly so.

Customers have a lot of power because they have many choices. If you’re priced too high, they’ll buy from a competitor. If you’re priced too low, they’ll cut into your profits. The trick is pricing your products in such a way that it’s a win-win both for you and your customers.

But with so many competitors out there, how do you figure out the best price point? The answer, unsurprisingly, is by using price scraping. By scraping prices from websites, you’ll get real-time data on how your competitors are pricing their products.

You can use this information to price your products better, or similar to your competitors. Not only that, you can see how the market changes the prices of products throughout the year. So for example, if a product gets discounted during the winter season, you’ll know to discount your product too.

And because of this real-time information, you’ll gain by scraping prices from the website, you’ll have a higher chance of winning the ‘price wars’ against your competitors.

Latest Technological Trends

Today, technologies like AI and blockchain have created completely new businesses. As such, if you’re planning to create a product or service that uses these technologies, you’ll need a data scraping service.

That’s because both blockchain and AI require huge loads of data to exist. Without getting significant data, you won’t be able to train your AI or build your blockchain products. Both need a constant stream of relevant data in order to keep improving. And the only way for these technologies to get the amount of data they need is through web scraping services.

And by training your AI or blockchain with data, you can create a wealth of new products like smart home devices, smart web apps, and even smart assistants.

As you can see, with web scraping services, the possibilities are endless. Here’s a recap of what you can use data crawling for:

Data Analysis: Getting data about your competitors, business, and industry to make predictive data-driven decisions.
Company Development: To find insight into the business practices of your competitors, the shopping behavior of your customers and about your target audience.
Price Wars: To figure out the best price points in order to compete effectively in the vast online market and to maximize sales.
Latest Technological Trends: To grow your AI or Blockchain based startup by constantly scraping data that helps these technologies improve.