How web scraping impacts market research

Market research is a crucial strategy for companies that want to succeed in their respective market. Businesses need to understand their competitors and their potential client base. Otherwise, they are destined to fail, especially in a competitive, digitised business environment.

Proper research forces companies to get out and scan the web with ambitious aggression. This involves collecting and analyzing data to better understand business trends plus the supply and demand of sold products and services. To better understand the market, we need to know the potential opportunities, strengths, and weaknesses of competitors, and other impact metrics that affect company decisions.

With a constant flow of information, modern businesses know how to navigate the market and plan their development and marketing. In this article, we will go over ways to conduct market research and its massive influence on business tasks. We will also go over the role of data scrapers – automated tools for information collection. You will learn the influence of these tools as well as their different variants. For example, you can write a simple web scraping script to collect data about your market or use complex tools to get more information faster, and with greater efficiency. For example, you can use a SERP API – an automatable tool to gather the most relevant information from search engines. They also come equipped with proxies – intermediary servers that protect your identity online. Proxies are essential for the efficient collection of data online. They will help you avoid IP bans and ensure that aggregation for market research is never interrupted. To learn more about SERP API and similar tools that use proxy servers, click here. For now, let’s focus on the influence of market research on businesses in 2023. 

Why modern companies need market research

While the necessity may differ based on the size of your company, most businesses in 2023 need to research their market. For example, even a small bakery can benefit from marketing on the internet, and analyzing which businesses have done so already is a great first step. Here are the main reasons modern companies depend on market research.

Getting in touch with the client base

By researching the market and focusing on customers, companies can create a closer connection with the client base. Businesses can learn about their preferences by collecting information from forums, comment sections on competitor websites, and opinions on social media platforms.

Once a company understands the desires and preferences of its visitors, it can restructure its live locations or online shops to tailor to their buying behavior. Researching individuals that are enthusiastic about the type of product or service you offer is essential. It is the best way to ensure that the presentation, pricing, and availability are all in tune with your target audience.

Competitor analysis

By knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your top competitors, you can fill the gaps with adjustments that make your company a suitable alternative.

The most common market research strategy involves a constant collection of public data. For example, competitive price monitoring ensures that you always know the pricing of other businesses faster than they know yours. You can undercut their prices if the sales still bring in profit or introduce new products that are short in stock at their online shops.

Analyzing the competitor, pricing, SEO, the structure of the website, and other factors is the best way to improve your company. Once you see what works for the top competitor besides their weaknesses, there is a clear goal with tasks that improve your company.

Web scraping in market research

Web scraping lets you collect information from desired websites. The most attractive targets are social media platforms for researching advertisers, search engine results pages (SERP) to learn about competitor ranking, and the pages of retailers for analysis of your biggest rivals.

Anyone with little programming knowledge can write a primitive web scraping script. However, with the explosion of popularity of data collection tools, businesses can buy pre-built scrapers depending on their needs.

If your company heavily depends on data scrapers for market research, it most likely develops its tools or builds upon existing solutions. For smaller businesses, a simple scraping script that can run multiple instances is more than enough to collect relevant data.

Why do you need proxy servers?

Because the majority of companies in 2023 use data scrapers, everyone is aware of the strategy. Your competitors will know about your attempts to scrape their pages. They will be equipped with rate limiting protection tools that will IP-ban connections that do not look like real user traffic.

Thankfully, we have proxy servers – intermediary stations that take your web scraping requests and assign them a new identity. The best proxy providers offer secure residential proxies with millions of IPs for your protection. Proxies can protect not one but multiple data scrapers, letting you scale up your efforts and gather as much data for market research.

Web scraping is an essential tool for market research. To get a bird’s eye view of the entire market without exposing the primary IP address, businesses need proxy servers.

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