Data scraping is not a new practice. It pre-dates the internet and existed even before data mining was much of a concept. From a #marketing perspective, it began long before manual copying and pasting. Relevant company information got copied with pen and paper. These days, bots do the work for us and have a superior success rate.
Data scraping, web crawling, data extracting, screen scraping, Data Mining, Web Crawling or similarly-named activities, are still legal and easy to do. Here are just a few #strategies to consider
Data scraping is not a new practice. It pre-dates the internet and existed even before data mining was much of a concept. From a marketing perspective,Guest Posting it began long before manual copying and pasting. Relevant company information got copied with pen and paper. These days, bots do the work for us and have a superior success rate.
The concept of data scraping has been on shaky ground regarding legal concerns. Thanks to the settlement in the early 2000s with eBay vs. Bidder’s Edge, companies can still take accessible website information. Obviously, this can’t extend to hacking to steal private information.
Data scraping, web crawling, data extracting, screen scraping, Data Mining, Web Crawling or similarly-named activities, are still legal and easy to do. Here are just a few strategies to consider:
Competitive Monitoring
Content Aggregation
Sentiment Analysis
Machine Learning
1. Competitive Monitoring
Competitive monitoring, or competitor analysis, is central to data scraping. You have to learn what competitors already know and then some. Markets like real estate depend on data scraping to make informed decisions. Using data scraping to keep track of the details gives you valuable information to keep you ahead.
A real estate investor in Budapest used a service that allowed extracting data directly from a real estate site. This included:
Monthly rent and sales prices
The property’s district
Whether the property had furniture in it.
Most important from a competitive standpoint, was that the data scraping tool extracted the view counts for each property.
Of course, competitors can do the same thing to you. That means remaining vigilant in this landscape is challenging. Data scraping techniques can help everyone. Success comes down to who, if anyone, utilizes it better. Knowing how your competitor’s customers act helps you handle your own and win more people over.
It’s also crucial to determine whether data scraping could help you retrieve data that your competitors might miss. In real estate, you might check to see if websites showed a property on the market recently. The scraped information could also detail the circumstances of the eventual sale.
When data scraping for competitive monitoring, consider Scraper API, or any proxy service, to reroute your IP address. If a website realizes you’re scraping the site owner’s data, it may prevent your address from obtaining publicly available information.
Competitor monitoring data scraping tools are available for free. When or if you find that the website has blocked a proxy you were using, you can simply move on to another one.
2. Content Aggregation
Another great use of data scraping is getting to know your audience on a whole other level. You can see what people say about you, your product and your competitors’ products by examining the right data points. You can also boost your content by using the collected data in the right way. Writer Mathew Barby got his BuzzFeed article on the front page and viewed over 100,000 times by using data scraping.
He gathered concrete data instead of going with his instinct about what to post and when. First, he collected the names of blog contributors. Then, he went further by getting extra author details. Sometimes, that was as easy getting links to their social media profiles from author bios. Barby put all the scraped data into a spreadsheet. It ranked each author according to their social media follower accounts as well as the post date and time.
Before you produce content for a site, Barby recommends applying some of the data scraping strategies above. Determine twitch follower bots which content types will get you the best results based on other author’s article views.
There’s more to the process than just monitoring other bloggers. But, collecting data on what, how and when the professionals write can help you grow beyond them.
After you know how content aggregation and data scraping fits into your strategy, learn to change and remove browser headings. They check for and block web scrapers. But, browser headings are alterable with codes you can manipulate.
Alternatively, opt for a headless browser. This technique’s a little trickier, but it pays off by scraping web destinations like social media sites. A headless browser can be difficult but not impossible to achieve. Once you have it, you’ll practically be unstoppable.…