Collecting Consumer Analytics Data With Web Scraping
With the ubiquity of online retail and eCommerce sites, consumers now have the ability to provide extensive feedback on products and services. This feedback, essentially consumer data, is the key element of consumer analytics. Consumer analytics informs an organization of how different aspects of their work is perceived by those who engage with it. The process of consumer analytics reveals insights about consumer’s feelings, price points, and engagement. By collecting consumer feedback for valuable data analysis, your organization will attract new consumers and create a better experience for pre-existing ones.
If you already know the basics of consumer analytics, use the table of contents to discover why web scraping is the perfect analytics tool.
Table of Contents
What is Consumer Analytics?
Consumer analytics is the process of extracting and analyzing consumer data in order to make data-driven decisions. The insights gained through this analysis helps inform future marketing campaigns, the development of new products, and increase sales. Some sources of data include retail sites, online reviews, social media, and more.
This data is especially useful because it is derived from actual consumer experiences. Unlike traditional forms of research and development, consumers choose to leave online comments and reviews of their own volition. Instead of being guided by research questions, consumers can write about whichever aspect of a product or service they like, meaning that each comment is more indicative of a consumer’s real priorities.
Consumer behavior marketing
There are a limitless combination of factors (and subsequent data sources) that can influence why your customers would want to buy certain products, when, at what prices, where, and how much. Optimizing consumer analytics comes from a real specialization in consumer behavior marketing. Not only does data allow you to track behavior, patterns, and trends in the immediate, but fully understanding your products and sales and marketing efforts can help your business grow into new spaces.
Data is the foundation of what makes consumer behavior relatable and explainable. Web scraped data is an efficient way to collect as much data as possible and with as much advanced depth as you can generate. Ultimately, consumers have a fundamental expectation that the products they buy and the brands they consume will be able to develop a relationship with them–and so that means conducting consumer analysis on the entire journey, from branding to advertising, to point of purchase, to the lifespan of the product. Collecting data on the entire engagement process will help inform new methods to identify how to engage successfully in the future.
How to Find Consumer Data
Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a webpage, is the perfect tool for utilizing online data sources. Through using different scraping modules, you can scrape almost any online data source. That source’s data is then put into a downloadable spreadsheet that is easy to share with your team or collaborators.
Scraping can be done manually, but using a scraping tool is the most efficient option. Web scraping saves you time, money, and energy. This is a great option for those running a small business on their own. If you can’t afford to hire and develop a data team, web scraping helps you collect enough data to perform in-depth analysis.
Web scraping API
If your team is or is interested in developing apps, programs, and software that needs data in order to operate, then a web scraping API is an advanced option for connecting your developers with data streams. Web scraping can generate tons of data from publicly available digital sources, and that data is made easily available for analysis. A web scraping API is an interface that takes the data from web scraping one step further, and the web scraped data is fed directly into your programming, eliminating a middle step in your generation. Knowing how to not only collect your data, but how to revolutionize the way you can use it to drive consumer insights can make a world difference.
Benefits of Consumer Data Analytics
Consumer analytics is essential for organizational growth. Below are just a few of the many ways that this analysis leads to growth generating insights.
Consumer sentiment insights
Consumer sentiment analysis is one of the best approaches for understanding how people feel about your product or brand. Emotions are powerful and a strong indicator of shifting values and the likelihood of someone becoming a loyal customer.
Scraping online reviews is a good indicator of sentiment because you can easily recognize patterns in the data. While you could manually read through and take notes about reviews, scraping helps you compile reviews side-by-side, so that the insights become more obvious. These insights can help you discover design flaws, shipping problems, positive or negative brand associations, and more.
Increase engagement
The goal of most organizations is increasing engagement, whether that means having more people buy products or gaining views on your latest video blog. Scraping data that reveals the channels consumers use to find your product helps you brainstorm additional channels for increasing sales and engagement.
Once aware of your potential customers, you can start to brainstorm how to reach them. By performing analytics, you can find where potential buyers are (online or offline) and brainstorm new channels. This includes starting to advertise on a new social media platform, creating ads tailored to potential consumers’ desires, or having promotions that incentivize new consumers to give your product a try.
Find the perfect price
In addition to finding new consumers, review data is also useful for determining your ideal price. Analyzing consumer responses to multiple price points, including your own and the competition’s, provides insight into the highest price the market can handle.
Scraping price data for both yourself and competitors makes it clear whether you have the freedom to increase your price a bit without pricing out your consumer base. Finding the ideal price point helps increase your sales, solidify your place in the market, and discover your target audience.
Web Scraping Consumer Data Sources
Web scraping is an essential tool for organizations big and small when it comes to consumer data analytics. Even for larger organizations with extensive data departments, web scraping can supplement internally generated data. Below are some of the data sources most relevant for consumer behavior data.
Social media
Social Media is a treasure trove for data. On social media sites, consumers feel free to share opinions about products or brands they like and dislike. However, social media data is more than just collecting opinions. For example, scraping a social media profile provides insight into what kind of accounts that person follows and who follows them. By learning how consumers behave and engage online, you can learn how to reach them and what they value.
Scraping trending topics is a good way to collect data regarding certain social and political issues in the news. Since many consumers want the products they use to reflect their values, understanding these values is the first step to creating products tailored to them. If you learn that lots of your consumers value the longevity of a product, then you can shift your focus accordingly to ensuring you use the highest quality materials or establishing a warranty policy for higher-value products to increase consumer confidence.
Online retail
Online retail sites, such as Wayfair, have tons of data available for conducting online retail analytics. Such analysis involves scraping prices, product details, reviews, and more. By understanding what kinds of materials or products consumers desire, you can find ways to incorporate these preferences into your product.
Because there are many eCommerce sites (Amazon, eBay, etc) to scrape, you will also collect tons of competitor data that helps you evaluate your role in the marketplace. Additionally, the more data you have the more accurate your insights.
Custom scraping solution
Scraping Robot’s scraping modules are useful yet limited. If you are further along on your scraping journey or have more specific needs, a custom scraping solution is a good fit for your organization. With a custom solution, the Scraping Robot team builds a scraper to fulfill your specific data needs. This includes scraping at a higher capacity (millions or billions) and accessing data points that traditional modules can’t. You also get the expertise and support of our team, ridding you of the responsibility to manage and develop a data team or worry about security issues.
If a custom scraping solution seems like the best fit for you and your organization’s needs, check out our process page to learn more.
Conclusion
Feedback is the backbone of growth. Without properly recognizing problem areas, you will be unable to find workable solutions. Thankfully, consumers are more empowered than ever to leave honest reviews online to evaluate products and services. With the help of a web scraping tool, these reviews can be extracted as consumer behavior data. By using this data to perform consumer analytics, your organization will be able to brainstorm solutions that address the actual concerns of consumers. This process increases current customer satisfaction and expands your reach, helping you discover new channels of support.
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