Real Time Analytics: 6 Essential Reasons Why You Need It

My friend and I were discussing content replacement on his site, and I mentioned real time analytics as a way for his visitors to stay updated. I was shocked when he asked me to explain what I meant because he didn’t understand. It got me thinking about just how susceptible people are to using outdated data if they don’t know easy methods to keep up with changes in data. Everybody needs real time analytics for one thing or another, no matter how small or big. In business, data collection and analysis is a way for organizations to stay abreast of new data. The more informed you are, the better the decisions you can make. 

Real-time big data analytics involves analyzing a large amount of data from as many sites as you want. There are many ways to extract data; for example, some companies develop proxy infrastructures, and some do it manually. However, the most recommended is web scraping because of how quick, affordable, and easy it is. It is like hiring a bot to “copy and paste” for you. Therefore, you don’t have to spend hours/days doing what a bot would do in minutes. You can use your saved time to indulge in other productive things or just relax. If you already know the ins and outs of real-time analytics, then you can get to the most interesting part via the table of contents. 

Table of Contents

What Is Real Time Analytics?

Data is always changing. While specific datasets are discrete and unchanging entities, data as a whole is amorphous. With over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated daily, holding on to particular datasets and database entries as unchanging is a bad idea. New updates, scientific discoveries, and technological breakthroughs are made every day. At a more fundamental level, people discover new things about themselves every day. They come up with new thoughts and ideas. All these contribute to an ever-changing data landscape that could render your data irrelevant moments after you collect it. So how do you keep up with these changes in data? Real time analytics is how.

Real time analytics focuses on methods and technologies that evaluate, supervise, and analyze data as it is being generated. As a business owner, you need it to keep up with trends, take necessary rapid actions, and prevent failure. Moreover, it provides valuable insights into your business, industry, and competition. 

The concept of data streaming (or real time analytics) is to update you on new updates on a data source, and it may not always be financial. It could help you keep track of social media updates, consumer trends, industry updates, etc. It would be draining to keep track of all these sites on your own, but you don’t have to. Web scraping entails automated procedures that allow you to extract data from any site to a document sheet. 

How To Use Web Scraping for Real Time Big Data Analytics

Web scraping is a specialized data collection method that can get you past the headache of how to collect data in large volumes. Web scraping bots work by crawling through the source code of a given webpage and tagging datasets according to some preset parameters. Then an extractor collects this data and downloads it into a spreadsheet. This data is collected so that it is already organized, and you can implement it into your sentiment analysis strategy straightaway. 

Now you might be wondering how this helps you with real time data analytics. Here’s how it does. Web scraping bots make use of API technology. APIs allow applications and software systems to talk to each other. So, instead of manually entering your scraping command whenever you want to scrape data, the API simply sends a request to the scraping bot to start scraping. You can set the API to send requests at regular intervals, say, every 24 hours. This ensures that your database is continually being updated. 

6 Essential Reasons To Perform Real Time Data Analytics

Real time analytics is the solution to websites that are often altered. Updating your site regularly is one way to improve user experience, which is why several sites are usually altered. Some of the website changes typically made can be a substitution or adjustment of the contents and modifications or the entire replacement of the format. Examples of real-time data analytics include:

• Daily weather forecasts.
• Stock price updates.
• Auction sites.
• Product or service price updates.
• Real estate listings. 

Many people face challenges with extracting big data real time analytics because of parsers. However, web scraping experts use the best software to override this obstacle and ensure seamless data parsing in real-time. Therefore, the only solution is to use real-time web scraping to stay up to date as a consumer. A web scraper will help you monitor the data changes in real-time so you don’t miss any updates. Here are other essential things you can do with the analysis of data in real-time:

• Finance Data for Business Success: Financial information sites, including Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance, have the data you need to make your business successful! For instance, scraping Yahoo! finance data will give you real-time statistics for data sets such as current investment rates, today’s stock price, quotes, estimates, market trends, and earnings. These financial websites contain the data on the factors that determine whether you will make a profit or loss. It is imperative to have your eyes on the website to get the data updates as they go. With the aid of financial information sites providing real-time stats, you can also improve your sales knowledge. 
• Supports Decision-making: Companies that have to make instant financial or transactional decisions according to the data updates need real-time data analysis support. As an investor, you need accurately updated information of the market for data such as stock or cryptocurrency trends to secure your investment. As a product-based business owner, you need constant data flow regarding the inventory to avoid taking orders above or below your capacity. There are so many ways in which you need to analyze data in real-time in business. If you need a consistent supply of data to assist with your business’s decision-making process, you are performing real-time data analysis. 
• Prevention of data decay: Data decay occurs when the data contained in your database is no longer relevant or up-to-date. This can be caused by software updates, content updates, or new discoveries. However, with real-time analytics, you can keep up with updates from your data sources and update your database as soon as changes occur.
• Early Detection of Errors & Fraud: NO ONE is perfect, and it applies in business as well. With real-time data analysis, you would quickly identify errors in transactions and create amendments to fix them immediately. If it is an error that directly affects your customers, early detection will help you promptly damage control to prevent losing the customer’s trust. When it comes to mistakes, the earlier you take note of them, the better for your business. It would save you from flat out failure and reduce the blow of making mistakes. Furthermore, fraud is another challenge that can be discovered early with real-time analysis before any damage is done. 
• Improve Strategies: Real time data analytics gives you insight into what your competitors are up to. By scraping their site, you would receive data on which strategies have worked effectively for the competition. Also, you would be notified of when the competitor is going to change their strategy. Now you can ultimately work on your strategy with the competitive intelligence you gained. 
• Consumer trend analysis: Consumers are the most fickle group of organisms globally (no offense, consumers!), especially if you happen to be in an industry like fashion. Trends can change overnight. You’ll wake to find people raving over a product that’s not even up to industry standards. Real-time data analysis can help you with this. By collecting and analyzing data from search engines, social media, forums, and review boards in real-time, you can easily stay on top of any consumer trends changes.

Using Scraping Robot for Big Data Real Time Analytics

At Scraping Robot, we pride ourselves on our cutting-edge scraping technology. Our Scraping service uses API technology and multiple proxies to enable you to collect data both in real-time and from numerous web pages simultaneously. You can get data in as fast as 60 seconds. This means you can keep an eye on all your data sources with a single scraping tool. To get started, all you have to do is send us a message detailing what you want, and our developers will get started building your custom scraping solution. You can check out our API documentation to learn more about how the technology works.

Conclusion

If you hope to ever establish a solid big data management strategy, you need a way to keep up with real time analytics. A single change in the value of a dataset can be all that stands between you and a lot of money. With our scraping service, you can blow through all obstacles and get data as soon as you need it. 

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Saheed Opeyemi