Web Scraping- A Vital Process That Is Crucial For Internet Marketers

Web Scraping has already become an online arms race. In the competitive market, even the big companies monitor, clean up the data and gain immensely.

December 21, 2020

Our achievements in the field of business digital transformation.

In fact, it is no less than a secret. Most of the Fortune 500 companies use multiple hacks to understand their competitors and the market better and gain the maximum profits. This also helps them achieve the targeted competitive rates, measure customer sentiment effectively, and strategize their business likewise.

How Web Scraping has evolved over the years?

It all started as a one-way tool that extracted web data. Today, it has turned into a big arms race where websites are targeted for their data records and gain the more competitive advantage over the competition.

Also, there are third-party tools available that help the websites in protecting their data against the competitors trying to scrape their data. These services can help the websites or companies identify such competitors and can block them.

Spoofing or Cloaking

There are several odd ways to avoid the data getting scraped by the competitors. One such way is avoiding the falsified information. This is also known as cloaking or data spoofing.

Many companies have employed proxy networks. These are the routers based on the data centers that work as proxy servers and can hide individual identity. However, such networks can be easily identified by big-shot companies.

P2P networks

The P2P network (peer-to-peer) is one such solution. This is kind of a residential IP network. Such networks comprise of incoming requests from the consumers who route through their dedicated IP. Such networks also host a lot of benefits such as ad-free browsing, use of such networks, free usage of many applications and more. This is for the companies which collect intelligence using such networks and their perception changes for the web. They see the internet world as their consumers and that too without any risk of spoofing or getting blocked.

Scraping has the potential to go beyond the wars of pricing strategy. This is because the Internet is a home to millions of unstructured data waiting to be tapped for better processing.

How companies use data scraping?

Some companies raise sales leads. This can also help them get high-quality prospects in their business processes. Some scrape boards can search the companies that are rising and can constantly monitor the activities on the internet and social media of firms that have just entered the market.

For instance, Proven is a popular skincare company and it creates highly-customized products through scraping customer reviews.

They have an updated database of around 10,000 beauty products, 8 million reviews and more than 4,000 articles about ingredients for their products and other skincare products.
They have a powerful machine learning algorithm that can check the links between similar products as per the features and purposes.
The customers fill out a survey form that can fit them into a skin profile which is AI-based and accordingly they get suggested skincare regime.

Just like any other industry, web scraping plays a vital role in the online advertising industry. The publishers across all advertising companies ensure that hackers do not use their platforms for any illegal purposes. They might rupture the data by spreading malware or viruses to the end users. So, marketers and publishers need to constantly monitor and scrape incoming data in the servers to make sure their content is safe.

There are chances that the hackers might misuse the platform and inject into the servers and the user database. When they recognize that a publisher is requesting data from the servers, they send the real advertisement. This prevents the publisher from publishing advertisements. Constant scanning of advertisement servers is essential for regular customers. This is how they can prevent their customers from any dangerous or fraudulent ads. Marketers need to get more creative to disrupt any industry with web scraping processes.

Web scraping is quite popular and a widely used process. It is highly empowering for any online commerce provider too. Majority of Fortune 500 companies are already leading the market by adjusting their prices with current market rates.

The industry has to gear up for this scraping battle as the online market rules the internet with surplus data. Moreover, the marketers have to keep up with the data to make sure it is safe in all terms.