Trend Data: Learn All About Web Scraping For Trends

Scraping Robot
August 24, 2022
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Trends provide businesses with significant marketing and promotional opportunities. A dance move gone viral, a TV event turned into memes, a Mother’s Day tribute — anything can get trendy on the internet. But you can’t wait for viral moments; you need to look at the bigger picture. That’s where trend data come in.

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Search and social trends can prove indispensable for any business marketing online. 71 percent of marketers consider strategic keywords to be their number one strategy. Trend data can also help identify those keywords quickly before the competitors pick them up. Read on to learn about trend data, trend scraping, and how to take advantage of search trend data for marketing.

Why Is Trend Data Important?

Why Is Trend Data Important?

Trend data is different from data trends. The latter refers to different trends in a data set. When we talk about trend data, we mean search trend data. This data shows what the world is searching for online.

You’d be surprised to see how quickly these search trends change on search engines and social media platforms. A hashtag with millions of posts today may be gone by tomorrow. In simple words, trend data tells you about what is happening right now. Marketers have to move quickly when tapping into what is in right now. A post that’s even a day late is too late.

Trend data can help a brand stay current and relevant. It can also increase audience engagement because you’re delving into the current topic, which people want to discuss. So they will engage with your posts and discover more about your brand. Not all of them might convert, but they will be aware of your brand.

According to Hubspot, 33 percent of marketers already use paid advertisements for brand awareness. Tapping into trends can give you that without paying for advertisements. It’s essentially earned marketing by capitalizing on what people are already interested in. Regardless of the niche of your business, investing in trend data and trend data analysis is a surefire way to up your marketing game.

With search trend data, you can produce content around topics or questions people are asking. Similarly, you can create and share relevant posts with social media trend data. It’s all about striking while the iron is hot!

What Is Trend Scraping?

What Is Trend Scraping?

With online trends, time is of the essence. Manually searching for search queries or social media trends can be a painfully time-consuming task. The top search engine in the world processes 99,000 searches every second. Imagine the amount of data you’ll need to analyze!

Trend scraping involves a trend scraper, a tool that searches for insights in search trend data or social media trend data. It’s a program that parses through these millions of requests and hundreds of thousands of posts to find relevant data for your business.

Benefits of Trend Scraping

Benefits of Trend Scraping

Here are the advantages of web scraping trends with a trend scraper:

Real-time trends analysis

One of the unique benefits of digital marketing is that it’s quick on its feet. However, that’s also one of its biggest challenges. How?

In many instances, you need to adjust your marketing strategy in real time, but that can be incredibly difficult to achieve through traditional digital marketing methods. Research, design, and testing require time, and you may miss out on marketing opportunities.

With a web scraper for trend data at your disposal, you can get relevant insights in just a click. As a result, you can tweak your marketing efforts on the go, almost in real time.

Quick and convenient

While it’s not difficult to find search trend data online, manually sifting through it can be time-consuming. Small businesses and even large enterprises may not have the resources to spend all that time searching for trends.

A trend scraper is designed to parse millions of data points in seconds, so what would take a data engineer or researcher hours or days can be done immediately.

Cost-effective

According to Gartner, marketing budgets have reached 9.5 percent of total revenue for many companies surveyed. Clearly, businesses take marketing seriously and are willing to spend top dollar on it. But is the return worth the investment? Not always!

Web scraping trend data can be a highly cost-effective strategy for marketing. Creating or buying a web scraper is a one-time expenditure. Similarly, buying proxies for scraping is also a one-time investment. The engagement and conversion you will reap from the data you unearth with trend scraping would pay off these expenses fairly quickly. Also, scraping is mostly automated, so it primarily works independently without much oversight, saving money on labor.

Competitive advantage

Trends in online searches and social media engagement can provide opportunities to stand out. Rather than waiting to compete with other brands, you can come out on top by tapping into online trends first.

Many brands spend money trying to outshine their competitors. Instead of focusing on the competition, you can leverage the power of trends to increase exposure and gain new customers.

Ask yourself this: Do you want to copy your competitors? Or do you want your competitors to copy you?

How To Create Your Trend Scraper

How To Create Your Trend Scraper

Now that you understand the value of trend data, you might be interested in creating your first trend scraper. It’s a program you can write once and tweak to use again and again whenever you need fresh trend data.

Of course, not every business has the technical expertise at hand to write a web scraper from scratch. But if you have an IT whiz among your staff, here’s how you can create a trend scraper:

Choose the programming language

A web scraper is a computer program written in a programming language. So the first order of business is deciding which programming language to use. Your choice should depend on your unique needs, but ideally, you want to use an easy and simple language. Python is the most popular programming language for web scrapers. Other options include Java, Node.js, and R.

Identify required data

Create a list of sources the scraper will scrape for data. This could be websites or search engine trend data pages. If you’re after social trends, you can identify the social media websites or apps you want to target. Take the time to see how the data is presented on the websites and whether it is readily available to the public.

Write the program

Finally, it’s time to write the scraper code. For instance, write a program to scrape the top 100 trends from a particular website every hour. You can do this for a specific website or a group of websites relevant to your business. Adding analytical features can also be beneficial, as the code can produce actionable results.

Test the code to see if it does what you want it to. Also, stress test it to see if it can handle a high volume of requests — which brings us to the last step.

Connect with proxies

If you want to succeed in your mission to scrape the web and social media for trend data with a trend scraper, you need to add proxies. Because a scraper sends hundreds of requests every minute, it could get caught on websites as a bot.

To prevent the worst-case scenario (an IP block), you can use different proxies or the same rotating proxies to circumvent these bot captures.

A Better Alternative: Scraping Robot

A Better Alternative: Scraping Robot

Creating your trend scraper from scratch is a major undertaking. First, you need someone capable of creating such a program. Then, you need to test it. All this takes time and money, which you can save by opting for an expert scraping tool.

Scraping Robot can take care of all your web scraping trends needs. It’s a written, ready-to-go tool that any business can use to scrape hundreds or thousands of web pages for trend data, including search engine result pages and social media pages.

Scraping Robot makes using the trend data your scraper collects easy by providing structured JSON output of a parsed website’s metadata. The data is parsed for you, along with usage and stats results, to help you learn everything you can about your target audience’s behavior. Then, you can feed that information directly into your website or database. You won’t need to worry about IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, or managing proxies. Scraping Robot handles these details on your behalf. In addition, they have a reliable support system and 24/7 customer assistance! Scraping Robot also partners with Rayobyte, a reliable and ethical proxy provider, meaning you can rest easy about your proxy usage and proxy management.

Even if you have developers on board, you can save time by using Scraping Robot. It is quite developer-friendly, and they can use the Scraping Robot API to move trend data to other marketing tools. In other words, you can streamline your trend data collection, analysis, and implementation by opting for a reliable web scraper for trend data.

Similarly, you can use safe, secure, and ethically sourced proxies from Rayobyte. You can leverage the anonymity of residential proxies or save money with more affordable data center proxies. Using a trend scraper without proxies may prove futile, so this is an essential investment.

Final Words

Final Words

Digital trends come and go at an unprecedented speed. Lagging in capitalizing on these trends can leave your brand behind. Even if you’re a well-established name in your industry, leveraging the power of trends can help you explore new markets and audiences. And what’s not to like about that?

Trend data can reveal real-time trends online, especially on search engines and social media. It can give you the most relevant keywords to use at the moment. Never miss a marketing opportunity with Scraping Robot as your trend scraper. Try Scraping Robot today!

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