Companies are always on the lookout for new technologies to help them improve the decision-making process, become more competitive, and get ready for the future. If you are involved in a progressively-thinking company, then you have probably stumbled upon web crawler and data scraping terms.
These software-powered processes can help you do structured research online, retrieve data, and perform analytics. Since data scraping and crawling is not something that you’ll hear about at a networking event, we decided to provide you with a bit more information about it. Let’s see what it is and how it can help your business.
Benefits of Web Crawling in Business Environments
With markets becoming saturated and volatile worldwide, accurate and actionable information became vital for businesses in all industries. Web crawler comes in handy in these uncertain times. Developers managed to fine-tune web crawlers to extract specific information from pre-set websites.
Businesses can extract all sorts of information to streamline decision-making processes and get a competitive advantage. Learn more about the benefits of web crawling for companies on the Oxylabs website. Also, we outlined some of the most noteworthy benefits of web crawling in business environments:
- Increased profits – business can use data crawling to get instant insight into competitors’ pricing policies, discounts, and special offers. They can use the data to offer their products and services at competitive prices, generate more sales, and increase profits.
- Improved customer relationships – understanding customers and discovering their problems, needs, and wants is imperative for many businesses. Thanks to web scraping, companies can now extract information from customer reviews, product comparisons, social media comments, and consumer forums to perform sentiment analysis and improve their products and services.
- Business futureproofing – extracting data from industry reports, studies, consumer survey results can help businesses identify trends and build prediction models to help them get ready for the future.
- Improved brand reputation – monitoring customer sentiment is only one side of brand reputation efforts. Data scraping can help businesses perform background and reputation checks on all employees and potential business partners to ensure that nothing can backfire and hurt the brand reputation.
Motivations Behind the Implementation of Web Crawling
For some businesses, the benefits mentioned above provide more than enough motivation to implement web crawling and execute a data scraping strategy on the internet. However, there’s more to it.
Some businesses do online data extraction manually. It’s a tedious and time-consuming process based on repetitive copy-pasting. When they find out that a software tool can completely automate this process and make it error-free, they become strongly motivated to consider its implementation.
Affordability is another factor that comes into play here. Data scraping implementation is affordable. The software on its own is very cheap. On top of that, businesses don’t need to invest in IT infrastructure or have IT experts on a payroll. There are cloud-based data scraping solutions that deliver a hands-free experience.
How To Pick the Right Web Crawling Tools?
With thousands of web crawling tools online, it may appear hard to choose the right one. However, there is a short check-list of questions. Answering them can help you figure out which tool is the best for your company.
Do you want to maintain web crawlers and data scraping on your own? Not all web crawlers and data scraping services are the same. Some companies will provide you with all the tools you need to make these bots on your own, while others deliver out-of-the-box solutions you can use immediately. A good example would be this amazon scraping tool (third party).
Feel free to give the data scraping a test run to assess its ease of use. The less time you spend figuring out how things work, the better.
Are you going to run your crawling and scraping operation in-house? Do you have sufficient IT infrastructure and workforce to launch an operation that encompasses extracting data from hundreds of thousands of websites? If not maybe a cloud-based data scraping solution is better.
What type of data do you need to extract? Do you need flat or nested data types? Do you need them exported in JSON, spreadsheet, or both? Getting all these questions answered will make it easier to comb through data scraping service features and choose the right crawling tools for your company.
Why Is This Such an Important Choice?
It is always an important choice when it comes to which technology solution to implement. Choosing the right web crawling tools for your company will potentially save you a lot of troubles down the road. You will be able to have an ongoing data crawling strategy to pull the latest data from relevant sources and let it guide your decisions.
Using reliable data crawling services means that you will spend less time troubleshooting bots and more time extracting data. And finally, using a web crawler built to meet your specific business needs translates into reaching goals faster.
Final Words
Web crawling and data scraping have many benefits for companies. It’s an automated process that enables you to extract important data from online sources. You can use it to optimize prices, improve brand reputation, attract more leads, and improve revenue across all sales channels.