Using Web Scraping to Collect Digital Marketing Data

As a digital marketer, you probably already know how difficult it is to get the exposure you want. Your blogs and videos may be unique, informative, and contain the right keywords. You still may not get the attention you deserve. It’s easy to disappear because the internet is expanding rapidly. As of January 2021, there are a whopping 5.66 billion active internet users worldwide, with the largest number of online users in Asia.

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To stay ahead of your competitors and establish yourself as a leader in your niche, you should integrate web scraping into your workflow. Web scraping refers to the process of collecting high-quality content that you can use to boost traffic to your website. For instance, researching the number of followers and posts on your competitors’ social media pages is a form of scraping. You can manually scrape information by typing statistics into an Excel sheet. But if you need to scrape big data in a short period, consider using scraping APIs. Built to extract data from websites, scraping APIs can extract, aggregate, and organize material 24/7. A scraping API can save you a lot of time and money.

Read on to learn more about the relationship between big data and digital marketing data science and how a scraping API can boost your marketing strategy. Feel free to use the table of contents to jump between sections.

How are Big Data and Digital Marketing Connected?

As a digital marketer, you’re probably familiar with the impact that big data can have when you’re developing digital marketing strategies. However, before we delve into how you can use big data in digital marketing to boost user engagement, let’s define big data. 

Big data refers to extremely large data sets that can be analyzed to reveal patterns, provide insights, and be used in analytics for various purposes. Compared to regular large datasets, big data has the following four characteristics:

1. Volume: The main characteristic of big data is that there’s so much of it. Marketing scrapers collect big data from diverse sources, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, point-of-sale data, eCommerce sites, and social media pages.
2. Velocity: Big data can also be sent and received much faster than regular datasets due to IoT technology, radio frequency identification tags or RFID chips, and 5G data streaming.
3. Variety: Big data comes in many formats, including email, videos, social media, and ads.
4. Veracity: Big data is incredibly accurate and trustworthy due to its large sample sizes. It can also be collected in real-time to offer real-time insights.

Since big data provides a comprehensive view of the market, you can use it to:

• Discover more about your audience: By analyzing your competitors’ websites and other top sites in your niche, you can pinpoint what your customers want and how you can meet their demands. As a result, you can create better and more accurate consumer personas.
• Refine digital marketing strategies: Big data allows digital marketers to aggregate and analyze which marketing strategies work and which need to be improved. You can also use big data analytics to see how you’re matching up to your competitors in terms of branding and pricing.
• Analyze social media posts and reviews: By extracting and organizing social media posts, comments, and reviews, you can get a better understanding of how consumers feel about your niche.
• Cut marketing costs: Analysis of big data can help deliver more successful marketing campaigns and reduce your ad spend.

In short, big data has all of the information you need to develop an optimal digital marketing strategy.

How Can We Implement Data Analytics to Digital Marketing?

To get a better return on investment (ROI) for your business and develop better ways of marketing on the web, you need to apply data analytics to digital marketing. Otherwise, you run the risk of falling behind your competitors. Most companies now make marketing decisions based on big data analytics. You can’t afford to let them leave you in the dust.

Although integrating data analytics into your workflow sounds intimidating, it’s pretty easy if you use a web scraper. A web scraper allows you to scrape different websites at lightning speed. You can spot trends and patterns that would’ve taken you a lot more time and energy to notice if you scraped manually.

Here are some ways digital marketers can use web scraping to their advantage:

Blog content scraping

Evergreen, well-written, SEO-rich content is the backbone of modern digital marketing. However, you may not always have the time or energy to come up with fresh content. Use a web scraper to scrape all of your competitors’ Meta Tags, URLs, blog titles, and more to stay ahead of the curve and make sure your content provides real value. Doing this will give you a clear idea of what keywords, titles, and topics your competitors use.

Social media scraping

There are endless benefits to scraping data from social media platforms. You get a good look at what real people say about your company. You’ll also get to see what they say about your competitors’ products and services. 

Scraping social media platforms can help you answer the following questions:

• What do customers in my niche or industry like? What do they expect from certain products or services?
• Who are the influencers in your niche or industry? What are they talking about?
• What are the trends in your niche or industry?
• What kind of posts (i.e., video, photo, or text posts) are the most popular and why?

Forum and message board scraping

Consider scraping forums and message boards in your niche or industry to get insights into subcultures and communities. You’ll quickly discover what’s of interest to your target market. Focus on the following statistics:

• Which topics are the most popular?
• Which topics get a high number of likes?
• What other topics do posters post about? Are there any that you can incorporate into your website content?
• Do your competitors post on these forums and message boards?

Competitor analysis scraping

Web scrapers can also help you get valuable data about your competitors. You can scrape large eCommerce sites like Amazon and eBay as well as your competitors’ sites to generate insights on how to price and advertise your products and services effectively. Here are some of the categories of product data you can scrape:

• Product name
• Price
• Ratings
• Product description (short and full version)
• Sales rank
• Seller
• Shipping details and prices
• Popular questions and answers
• Product images and image URLs
• Video descriptions
• Ratings

Email scraping

You can also scrape emails to create a high-quality email list. 

To start, find a webpage with email addresses that you want to scrape. Before you begin scraping, however, make sure you know the best practices for web scraping. Then, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is this page legitimate? Were the emails published with user consent? Are these real email addresses?
2. Are you allowed to scrape this site? Check the site’s robots.txt. Some sites ban bots from scraping their sites. Be sure to respect that.
3. What are you allowed to do with the scraped email addresses? Before you start sending emails to the scraped email addresses, check your local rules and regulations about spamming. Some jurisdictions have anti-spam legislation that makes it illegal to send multiple emails to large numbers of email addresses at once.
4. What do you want to do with the scraped email addresses? Do you plan to “spam” ads to these emails? Or will you send thoughtful emails to potential customers? You can also use your list of emails to create custom audiences for online ads.

After you’ve thought that through, you can start marketing web scraping.

How to Scrape for Digital Marketing Data Analytics

As we’ve mentioned, big data digital marketing scraping is quite simple if you use a web scraper. All you have to do is download and install the marketing web scraper and tell the scraper the URL of the page you want to scrape. It will give you the information within seconds.

Most scrapers require you to know some coding. However, if you’re not a coder or want a more streamlined solution, your best bet is Scraping Robot’s API. Our software is an all-in-one digital marketing solution that will empower you to make the most out of digital marketing big data. We offer:

• 5000 free scrapes per month: You don’t have to pay to use our software if you only need 5000 scrapes per month. What’s more, our API includes all features.
• Simple pricing: Say goodbye to monthly subscriptions. Once you go above 5000 scrapes a month, the charge drops to $0.0018 per scrape.
• 24/7/365 customer support: Our IT team will answer any questions or concerns you have at any time.
• New modules added and updated frequently: Because we want to give you the best scraping experience possible, we constantly review, update, and add modules for our customers. You’re also welcome to request new modules—if your module request is something that we believe other customers will benefit from, we’ll add it to our software at no cost to you.

Interested? Sign up to get free web scraping today.

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