Building Your Data Collection Strategy (How Web Scraping Can Help)

Table of Contents

What is Big Data Strategy?

A big data strategy is an organization’s comprehensive vision for how to collect, organize, store, and analyze data and other data related tasks. The strategy should state specific steps and goals regarding what kinds of data you are interested in, which sources to extract that data from, and how to handle the data afterwards. A big data strategy prevents data issues along the way therefore giving you and your team more time to take meaningful data-driven steps towards the future.

Having a data management strategy is especially important for larger organizations with many departments. Because data driven strategy is useful and common across industries, it is likely that multiple departments will do analytics of some kind. It is important to have an organization-wide data strategy in place beforehand so that each department has a model or guiding principles to use when developing their own department specific plan.

How to Create a Data Strategy

Creating a data strategy requires an organization to

• Define goals or guiding principles
• Assess current state of organization
• Describe how adopting a data driven strategy would benefit the organization (what problems are you trying to solve? What aspects of your process could be better run with data?)
• Create a data roadmap
• Implement other changes in the process that can support new data roadmap

An organization must first state their main business objectives or guiding principles first in order to ensure the rest of the strategy is in line with those objectives. Then, analyze the current state of your business through the lens of these newly defined goals or principles. It is important to also brainstorm how performing data analysis will benefit the organization. This could be as simple as saving money or as complex as brainstorming your next marketing campaign.

Once you’ve done all the preliminary work, you’re ready to create a data roadmap of what strategies or data you are going to use. In addition to creating data strategies, it is important to define any cultural, structural, or other organizational shifts that will be made to support the new data analysis strategy.

Web scraping

Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a webpage, is the perfect tool for both creating and implementing your data strategy. If you’re struggling to assess the current state of your business, scraping sales data and customer reviews yields valuable insights into your state of affairs. For example, if scraping your sales data reveals a dip in sales then you know one of your data analysis objectives should be to increase sales. Therefore, your organization might decide to do more consumer sentiment analysis in the future in order to stay updated on consumer needs and trends.

Once you have your data collection strategy, web scraping tools can be used to extract data from many kinds of web pages such as online retailers, social media, online databases, and more. Whichever kinds of data your organization decides will be most beneficial to analyze, there is likely a Scraping Robot module that is built to specifically work through data from that website.

Benefits of a Data Driven Strategy

Once you’ve created a data collection strategy for your organization, you’ll discover many benefits including a deeper understanding of your organization, an improvement in customer relations, and the ability to track and predict industry trends.

Get a deeper understanding of your organization

In the process of creating a customer data strategy, you’ll have to assess the current state of your organization. This step is necessary for developing goals for a data analysis strategy which becomes your roadmap. With a web scraping tool, you’ll be able to learn more about your organization.

Beyond the development of a data strategy, it is important to regularly use web scraping to extract enough data to get a sense of how the strategy is working towards your goals. Scraping social media provides insights into how your organization is being spoken about online by customers or in general.

For brands that rely heavily on social media popularity or have a younger target audience, scraping social media for brand insights is extremely important. In addition to scraping mentions, scraping the profiles of your followers gives you a sense of what other accounts (interests, brands, celebrities, etc) they follow and interact with.

Improve customer relations

An important aspect of strengthening your organization is improving customer relations. With more customer reviews available online than ever, scraping those reviews is an easy way to discover consumer sentiment regarding your brand, products, shipping process, and more. While customer reviews can be individually read and analyzed, scraping reviews allows you to seem them all together as data which makes it easier to recognize patterns or other common feedback.

Scraping consumer data helps you create online advertisements that are targeted towards consumer desires or based on previous purchases. This makes it more likely that past customers will buy again and prospective customers more likely to check you out.

Track industry trends

In order to have a truly data driven strategy, an organization should use scraping and predictive analysis to prepare for future changes in the industry or consumer behavior. Using a scraping tool to assess your own organization and competitors provides you with data on many of the players in your industry.

You can also scrape industry data from online databases or other sources to get a sense of how your industry is changing and how those changes might impact your organization. With this information, your organization can make action plans for the future instead of reacting to changes as they come.

Keep up with your competitors

Analyzing pricing pages is another great way to identify and anticipate trends in your industry. If you know what your competitors are offering, you can make better decisions about how to make your prices, products and services stand out. And standing out doesn’t just mean offering the cheapest price. With competitor price data, you can gain a better understanding of your audience, too.

Use our Amazon,eBay and Wayfair price scrapers to get started, or use our API to get real-time Amazon data.

Generate leads and improve audience engagement

Do you feel like your audience could use a refresh? Or, maybe you’re still working on building your following and don’t know where to start? Social media web scraping helps you start building this part of your data strategy. With social media scrapers, you can find information about your followers and discover opportunities to increase that following. Who does your audience follow? Why? With these insights, you can reach out to more customers and followers who are looking for the products, services and other solutions you have to offer.

Identify leads in your area

You can also use web scraping to compete more effectively with other similar brands and businesses.You can generate leads in your area, such as related businesses that might be willing to partner with you and help spread your message. For example: Do you want to find out how many shoe stores in your area are looking for your

But how did we do this? I’ll be the first to tell you that a data strategy isn’t built overnight. It takes some time to do research and ask the right questions. However, just because it takes some time and effort doesn’t mean it’s complicated. 

Building a Data Management Strategy with APIs

An API (Application Programming Interface) is the bit of code that allows two different software programs to share information and data without sacrificing security. For example, when you use an app to order food on your phone, the API for your phone’s software connects with the restaurant’s API to place your order. Just like other online programs, APIs can be scraped or incorporated into an organization’s website.

Scraping Robot API

The Scraping Robot API allows you to directly input data into your preferred analysis program therefore removing the step between extraction and storage. Once in your preferred analysis program, you can easily combine multiple data sources for more accurate analysis.

With our API you also get the expertise of Scraping Robot’s team who can ensure that your scraping needs are met quickly and securely while monitoring management and proxy development. If this sounds like a good fit for your organization, check out our API page for more information.

Conclusion

With tons of online data available for analysis, successful organizations must have a data collection strategy in place to avoid overwhelming individual departments with creating comprehensive data plans. Through identifying company goals, data sources, and a roadmap, your business will be reaping the rewards of a data driven approach.

With improved knowledge of your company’s state, industry trends, and customer sentiments, you’ll be able to have time to creatively move forward as an organization while being informed. The Scraping Robot API makes creating and maintaining a data driven strategy easier through allowing direct data input and quick analysis.

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.

Hannah Benson