Using Amazon Analytics To Your Advantage With Web Scraping
No matter the time of year, the first thing I see when I enter my apartment building is a pile of Amazon boxes in the hallway. Like lots of people today, I turn to Amazon when I need household items delivered quickly. With holidays and social distancing, online shopping is more popular than ever. As with other eCommerce sites, Amazon has many sellers in addition to its own brand of items. Even with Amazon’s control of the market, you can learn tons from using Amazon analytics to understand the market and help customers find your brand. While Amazon analytics provides lots of information, web scraping can help you get even more data. With this additional data, you will have a better sense of Amazon’s algorithm, helping you make more informed decisions in the future.
If you already know the basics of Amazon analytics, then use the table of contents to learn more about how to use a web scraper to gather even more data.
Table of Contents
What Is Amazon Analytics?
Amazon analytics is a tool offered by Amazon Web Services that gives sellers access to valuable brand insights such as the popularity of keywords, most viewed items for a given search, and even the percentage of clicks for each of those items. With this information, brands and other Amazon sellers are able to make smarter, data-based decisions. While larger brands used to pay other companies large sums for analytics data, Amazon now offers it directly to sellers after a history of keeping their data fairly private.
3 Ways To Assess Your Competition With Amazon Analytics
Web scraping is the process of extracting information from webpages and organizing it into a downloadable spreadsheet. While Amazon offers valuable tools for analysis, using a web scraper can take your business to the next level by giving you additional data. This includes scraping both Amazon and other sites with similar data sets available. While this blog is oriented towards sellers, people purchasing products on eCommerce can also use scraping to spot trends in product reviews, prices, and rankings.
With analytics for Amazon sellers, it is easy to understand your own sales, but any truly successful seller must also understand the competition. Web scraping helps you gather data on the competition by helping you directly compare competitor prices and analyze their reviews. In addition to Amazon, you can also get more information by using an HTML scraper to scrape their website separate from Amazon and reviews on other eCommerce sites like eBay. You can learn more about competitor analysis in our previous blog post.
Discover product rankings
In the world of eCommerce, the higher ranked a product is in search results the more likely it is to sell. Therefore, every Amazon seller wants to find a way for their product to be at the top of Amazon’s product search. By scraping search results, you can understand what elements lift a product up in the search rankings. This helps Amazon sellers develop strategies to rise their product rank and turn a bigger profit.
Compare product reviews
Although I enjoy when memes of hilarious 1 star Amazon reviews show up on my feed, I am sure the sellers on the receiving end of that feedback feel differently. Amazon gives weight to product reviews in order to determine if others will like it. By understanding product reviews, sellers can find ways to change the product or customer service process. By scraping the most positive and negative reviews, you can start to find a sweet balance. Of course, there are many other sources online with reviews for brands and sellers that sell on multiple eCommerce sites. All these feedback sources create a comprehensive look at customer sentiment.
Assess market data
While Amazon offers product data for sellers, understanding the market as a whole is essential to success. By scraping the most in-demand products and the different categories on Amazon, sellers can identify where in the market their items will be best situated. This helps you find the perfect place in the market instead of being hyper focused on your business alone.
3 Ways You Can Build Your Brand With Amazon Analytics
Determine target group
If your Amazon sales analytics are not as good as you hoped, maybe it is time to find a better target group for your items. While Amazon customer analytics is useful for this, social media is a great tool for understanding different groups of consumers. By scraping social media sites in addition to using Amazon analytical tools, you can paint a fuller picture of the demographics that buy your items the most. Once you understand your target audience, you can make product additions and marketing decisions based on attracting that specific group.
Similarly, if you are struggling to engage a certain demographic, you can also use scraping to get more insight and how to appeal to them.
Boost your rankings
Amazon product rankings determine search results on the site. By raising your product ranking, you will expand your reach by appearing higher in Amazon search results. When you scrape Amazon analytics, you get detailed information about how to cut costs, develop a perfect price point, and improve your overall process. With these insights, you can make the changes necessary to boost your rankings. As mentioned earlier, when you scrape Amazon search results, you can identify what traits factor most into rank. Understanding these traits gives you better insight for future decisions about changes to product and process.
Hear what customers are saying about you
Amazon analytics gives sellers lots of information about reviews. While it can be easy to focus on the positive/negative binary, scraping reviews helps you understand the nuance in customer feedback. For example, you might notice a trend of reviews where the product is strong but the delivery process is weak. With this information, you can change your product or production in line with detailed customer reviews.
How To Use Scraping Robot To Supplement Amazon Analytics For Sellers
Scrape Amazon with a custom project
While you can learn analytics, Amazon offers limited amounts of data. Using certain scraping modules can help fill in gaps, but a custom scraping solution is a more comprehensive way to go beyond what Amazon gives you and look into specific aspects of your business. For example, a custom scraping solution offers you the ability to scrape by the millions and even billions, paying less per each scrape. Because Amazon is such a large eCommerce site, you need to collect tons of data to truly discover any useful trends. Additionally, smaller sellers don’t have the same resources as large brands for marketing and other forms of research. When you build a custom solution with Scraping Robot, our team manages the scraping for you. This relieves you of the stress of buying/managing proxies and hiring developers. For small business owners looking to get better value and compete with big brands, custom scraping solutions can help you do lots of research without the hefty price tag and large amounts of your time. Contact us to get started.
Scrape social media to understand Amazon customers
As I mentioned earlier, social media sites provide great supplemental data to Amazon sellers. Big Data can help you understand certain demographic details about customers and reviews help you understand the pros and cons of your experience, but social media helps you understand peoples’ deeper interests and desires. Especially for sellers in niche markets, scraping social media sites helps you understand what products people are looking for or problems to solve. You can also gather information on who people are following and followed by. For example, you might notice a trend of people mentioning the same design flaw, which you can then fix and market to those same customers.
Use other eCommerce sites for comparison
While Amazon is an eCommerce giant, there are other similar sites you can scrape for equally useful information. Scraping Robot has modules built that can help you gather more reviews, competitor prices, and product descriptions to learn from. Sellers can gain valuable info from other eCommerce sites about trending products and the market that can either confirm or challenge the data Amazon provides. By checking multiple eCommerce sites, you can get a better understanding of what Amazon’s data means.
Conclusion
Amazon seems to take up more space in online retail with each passing day. While they recently started providing sellers with online analytics tools to help them understand their business, the data leaves much to be desired. Thankfully, supplementing your Amazon analytics with web scraping can give you access to more data on your own business and help you understand the competition on Amazon and beyond. By using Amazon’s tools to assess competition and build you brand, your business will reach new heights.
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