Top 4 Website Data Scraping Services Use Cases
A few months back I shared some of the ways our clients use
website scraping to make competitive business decisions. I thought it would be
a good idea to also post those use cases to our blog for all to benefit.
1.
Website Scraping Use Case: Location
Data
Whether you’re looking for leads, growth opportunities or
market research, understanding your competitive landscape is essential. We’ve
seen our customers do this in a few different ways.
The first method is to scrape location-based data directly
from websites that utilize a storefront finder feature. This may require you to
input zip codes or navigate through multiple pages of results. Leveraging Hir
Infotech will give you a comprehensive list of these physical business
locations.
For example, AMSOIL uses Hir Infotech to build a
searchable database of store locations that customers use to make in-store
purchases. Every day, AMSOIL’s data team is doing routine website scrapes of
specific geographical areas to understand when new mechanic shops or car part
stores appear. When a new shop pops up, so does a new pool of sales prospects
for AMSOIL. As AMSOIL’s data team discovers new store locations, they add that
data to their database. In addition to location data, AMSOIL also provides
its customers with their partner’s store phone numbers, addresses, and
product lists directly on the AMSOIL site, making it extremely easy for their
customers to make purchasing decisions.
The second location data harvesting method is to scrape large
aggregated sites that are niche-specific to your industry. Think yellowpages.com
or yelp.com;
whatever website houses data that could help you understand the market
footprint in specific geographical areas. What data do you need to identify
market saturation and expansion opportunities? In most cases, that data is
already aggregated online; all you need to do is harvest that data in a schema
that will help you make pivotal business decisions.
Some of the data that
our clients pull to make these decisions are:
Competitors: the number of competitor operations
in specific geolocations
Ratings: competitor customer ratings in
specific geolocations
Prices: competitor prices in specific
geolocations
2.
Website Scraping Use Case: Product
Data
We know how necessary it is to gather, update and publish the
most current product data to your customers. If you’re a retailer, manufacturer
or distributor, you have your eyes on many different data points. We also know
that these data points live in different silos. Product description data might
live in one area while product images and media live in another, and product
reviews live in yet another. At some point, these data points come together in
one common layout where it can be extracted. We have many clients who extract
this data from their own websites because they understand that their own site
is where they can get the most updated aggregated data on their products.
Retailers are also oftentimes frustrated that their
manufacturer or distributor can’t provide current product specs or images in a schema that can be directly uploaded to their consumer website. However,
manufacturers will often store this valuable data on their own site presenting
another opportunity was using a website scraping tool to gather data will
benefit you, your organization, and your consumers.
Adversely, if you’re a manufacturer you may want to make sure
your retailers and distributors are using the most current product details
which you provided for them online. This is another use case where some of our
customers have used Hir Infotech to set up routine scrapes that pull data from
their retailer’s site then cross-reference that data with their own to make
sure things look accurate.
More Information:
3.
Website Scraping Use Case: Price-Monitoring
Price-monitoring is a common way of seeing where you stand in
a competitive landscape. Our customers use Hir Infotech to harvest pricing data
in three ways:
Location pricing: To gain confidence in their location
pricing policies
Competitive pricing: To gain confidence that their
pricing is competitive
Audit distributors: To audit their distributors or
partner resellers pricing to make sure they are adhering to their contractual
obligations.
For a web harvesting project like this, it’s critical to know
the problem your newfound data will solve. Having a problem statement before
starting this type of web harvesting project will guide you in gathering
accurate data fields.
For example, your problem statement might require you to
harvest product assortment data to help you understand how many products a
competitor might sell and at what cost. Or, your problem statement might
require you to load individual product descriptions to help you understand what
your competitor is selling and at what cost. These two different problem
statements require two different strategies and data schemas. Knowing your
problem statement ahead of time will help you get data faster and implement a
strategy that can be easily pivoted rather than having to scrap the project and
start again with a new game plan.
4.
Website Scraping Use Case: Customer
Sentiment
Customer sentiment and reviewer information are critical in
today’s environment. The internet is now an established forum for customers to
voice their feedback whether it’s positive or negative. Therefore, knowing what
your customers are saying in a timely manner is an essential practice.
A household commercial appliance company came to us with a
problem statement that their customers were no longer providing product
feedback through their established processes. This meant that their product
engineers and quality assurance department weren’t getting the data they needed
to be proactive. Instead, customers were going to multiple online platforms to
share their feedback in an uncontrolled environment. Because of this, their
customer service department could no longer interface with their customers
privately to issue replacement products, discounts, or any other measure that
would limit the exposure of negative customer experience.
To solve their problem statement, this Hir Infotech customer
set up routine web data scrapes to gather online reviews and comments on
multiple forums and social media platforms. While these reviews were still
public, it gave this appliance company real-time insights into product issues.
This helped establish priorities within their company while also giving them a faster way of resolving negative customer experiences.
We’ve also seen our customers use Hir Infotech to scrape
specific hashtags and keywords surrounding a new product release. This kind of
data provides customer sentiment and insight into the dialog customers are
having around a product.
More Information:
The best part about
this strategy is that it can be automated. There are two levels for gathering
customer sentiment data:
High-level strategy: scraping review data to gain a sense
of the average product rating
Detailed-level
strategy: scraping
the actual review content to do further sentiment analysis
The web scraping strategy you choose goes back to your
problem statement. In the case of our customers, many departments within their
organization have overlapping challenges where website scraping has become a
part of their solution. As one department within their organization implements
these web harvesting strategies and begins to share their insights, others within
their company take note and utilize website scraping for their own problem
statements. This has been an opportunity for cross-department collaboration
within our customers’ organizations. Often times, the data that you need is
also worthwhile to another department.
No matter where you are in your data extraction strategy,
we’re here to help you discover your next step. We have multiple solutions and
services that are trusted and backed by ⅓ of our customers. The use cases for websitescraping are limitless. We can help you develop the right use case
for your industry and your data needs.
You can learn more
about our Solutions and Service solutions below.
Comments
Post a Comment