Predictive Analytics Tools And Web Scraping For The Future

My dad obsessively checks the weather. He’ll sometimes send me morning texts all the way from Illinois telling me if bad weather is headed my way in New York. No one can truly predict the weather, even the best meteorologists and dads. However, weather predictions get better and better with improvements in science. While I never know exactly what to expect during the day, weather apps give me a sense so that I’m best dressed for my day.

Similar to the weather, you can never know how a market will change in business but you can make predictions. A big part of succeeding in any industry today is anticipating shifts in the market and consumer interests. Similar to the weather, you want to be best dressed and prepared for whatever comes your way. While it is impossible to know the future of an industry, there are plenty of tools and data available online to help you make at least a few predictions. Predictive analytics tools, such as web scraping, use data to generate predictions for the future. This includes market predictions, anticipating trends, and predicting consumer desires. Mastering predictive analysis skills is essential for helping your organization move towards the future.

If you already understand predictive intelligence, use the table of contents to discover how web scraping is the perfect tool for predictive analysis.

Table of Contents

What is Predictive Intelligence?

Predictive intelligence is the process of using consumer data, both current and potential, to anticipate future purchases, shifts in the market, and consumer behavior. This process is often automatic with the help of predictive analysis tools such as a web scraper. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from web pages, is an analysis tool that is available to every organization, big and small. With the help of web scraping and other tools, Business intelligence predictive analytics will solidify your role in the future by helping you know what to expect.

How is Predictive Customer Analytics Useful?

There are more general predictive market analytics and then customer analytics. While predictive analytics in general is useful for market shifts and shifting demands at a mass level, customer analytics offers a more personalized online experience for consumers. Predictive customer analytics use data on a specific customer’s past purchases, online behavior, and more to anticipate what they might like to buy next. Below are ways that predictive analysis is useful for your organization.

Track market changes

Tracking changes in the market helps you understand your changing role within that market. Using data driven insights helps you keep a firm pulse on what consumers want and expect from products and companies as they evolve. Companies that keep up with these expectations remain successful in our rapidly shifting global economy. As consumers become more interested in natural cleaning supplies, those working in cleaning supplies would change their ingredients accordingly to attract more customers in the future.

Predictive tools exist outside the business world. In the health sector, predictive tools are being used to determine a woman’s risk for breast cancer and other illnesses. In this example, all of a woman’s previous and current health records are analyzed for how they change over time which helps the program predict how her health may change in the future. While different from business, predictive analytics has a role to play in every industry by helping us make sense of the past. The core of this process is using data to predict future outcomes whether related to health, business, weather, or politics.

B2B predictive marketing

B2B (business to business) predictive marketing helps businesses use previous customer data to analyze which customers are most likely to make more purchases in the future. With B2B data you can discover your target market, create an ideal customer profile (ICP), optimize lead generation, and evaluate the effectiveness of your ads.

For example, a company selling medical equipment to hospitals can use predictive data to analyze what equipment might be most useful in the future. Such data includes tracking the prevalence of specific illnesses/conditions, speaking with patients about their experience, and anticipating medical advancements to come. B2B data is especially useful for marketing and sales because the data provides you with an angle regarding how a specific product will be necessary for the future.

Analyze risks

Predictive analysis helps you move towards the future and avoid unnecessary risks. While I’ve only mentioned the growth opportunities that predictive data provides, it can help you avoid drastic mistakes as well.

For example, if the data predicts people will be traveling less in the next year, then airline businesses will be able to plan to offer fewer flights so that the supply isn’t higher than the current demand. Properly assessing risk through data avoids a plane ticket from becoming devalued when the market changes. Making shifts based on predictions such as industry data helps you assess risks and make sure you aren’t caught off guard in a bad way.

Web Scraping and Automated Predictive

Web scraping is the perfect tool for predictive analytics. Web scraping tools are easy to access no matter your current level of success and easy to use. Scraping Robot offers many modules for popular sites to scrape such as Amazon, Google, and eBay. But scraping has many more uses. You can use web scraping to collect data on prices, market trends, and consumers in order to conduct predictive analysis.

Web Scraping is the Perfect Predictive Analytics

Web scraping is the perfect way to collect useful data for analytics. Here are some ways you can take advantage of web scraping so that your analysis is as accurate as can be.

Trend analysis

Similar to tracking market changes, trend analysis helps you understand how styles, opinions, and behaviors are changing in a given market. This can be what style shoes are most popular or how people generally feel about plastic waste. Understanding trends is crucial to understanding how they will shift in the future. We all know fashion trends change rapidly, but so do other markets.

Scraping trending topics on social media sites can give you insight into how consumers are thinking about a given topic or style trend. You can scrape google search results to see the top sites for a given keyword. Search results data informs you what brands or online stores customers see first when they search for your product. Having Google search results data makes it easier to understand how you better show up in search results and what the competition is like for your organization.

Social analysis

Social media is home to tons and tons of free data. People express opinions about film, culture, politics, and more. Scraping for social data helps you understand what your customers want so you can give it to them in the future.

While this may seem most applicable to the business world, Social media predictive analytics is useful for creators of all kinds to understand how public interest is shifting. For those looking to start a small business, you can use social data to discover what is missing in the marketplace.

Custom scraping solution

Every project to expand your organization requires different sets of data. While Scraping Robot’s scraping modules can help you with certain projects, other goals require much more specific solutions. Creating a custom scraping solution with Scraping Robot allows you to get data specific to your needs while scraping at a larger capacity (millions or billions) at a lower rate per scrape. Working with our team means that you won’t have to worry about management and development of data or security issues. We take care of that for you so your organization has more time to use the data to grow. If this sounds like a good fit for your next project, use our process page to get started.

Future of predictive analytics

Looking towards the future is equal parts exciting and scary. We can never truly know what the future holds, but data can give us a glimpse. Predictive analytics tools like web scrapers help organizations collect and analyze data to help form predictions about the future. These predictions can be as general as the future of an industry or as specific as a customer’s likely next purchase. Either way, mastering web scraping skills and understanding predictive analytics is a sure way to help your organization handle whatever comes next.

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Hannah Benson