What is a custom web scraping tool?
A custom web scraping tool is a web scraping software that allows its users to extract data from websites without writing a single line of code. Tools of this kind are built on web scraping techniques. In other words, it’s a coding-free web scraper.
What can you do with custom web scraping tools?
Content Aggregation
Content is one of the low-cost ways to attract visitors to your websites. If you don’t have much content at the beginning to attract traffic to your website or provide content to your user in your phone App.
You can use a custom web scraping tool to collect content from websites or platforms to gather content. Besides, the content you scrape can also be your content library. When you need to write something, a lack of inspiration will never occur to you.
Competitor Monitoring
Knowing what your competitors are up to is very important to your business. Your competitors sell more, you’ll sell less. To get ahead of them, keeping a close eye on your competitors’ moves is necessary.
Monitoring their events, shipping, rating, pricing strategies, keywords, stock level, marketing campaigns, etc, can help you understand how your competitors are running their business and what are their goals in the industry. With this information, you’ll know how to compete with them and gain the upper hand.
Sentiment Analysis
Knowing how your customers are talking about the products and services offered by you and how they perceive your competitors are going to help you improve your business or prevent bad things happening to your business.
You can gather people’s review and opinion of your product or service to spot opportunities or tipping points. Strengthen your business by improving what your customers think is important. Put out the fire point of bad reviews before it burns your business.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is the essence of growing a business. Instead of waiting for leads coming in. Taking the initiative to find websites where your prospects have their information open to everyone.
You can fetch information such as phone numbers, names, emails, and addresses from websites like Yellow Page, Trade Fair, etc. A custom web scraping tool can help you collect thousands of leads within a few minutes.
Gather real estate listings
Having information such as real estate listing, building details, buyer and seller profiles and details on reputable real estate agents will ensure you have good quality and quantity of information.
This information helps you create your own database on your company’s website. In addition to that, it will also enable your company to make more informed decisions and set your business on the right track.
Market Research
When performing a market trend analysis, acquiring first-hand data is the most critical factor that affects the accuracy of your research. Gaining insights into any particular market scenario and the larger industry environment requires a great deal of data, and web scraping provides this data with a guaranteed level of reliability and accuracy.
Rigorous quality assurance standards are critical for this type of information, as subtle trends and market behaviors have been demonstrated as key indicators for market movement and being a first-mover unlocks tremendous opportunities for any organization.
Supply Management
Monitoring your suppliers’ stock level is very important to your business because this factor can affect how you balance the material delivery and the actual hand-over between your customers and suppliers. If you don’t meet your suppliers’ stock level well, it’s highly likely that you will lose a deal with your customer due to the failure to meet his demands.
It is helpful to you to gather information such as numbers of material, price, and part number, to name a few. This information is the basic part of your sales funnel. Using a custom web scraping tool to collect this information and have the tool update the information on a regular basis helps you always prepare for the next deal.
The target audience in advertising
The cost of advertising is getting higher year by year because more and more businesses have to pay more to prevent their competitors from taking over their ad rank. Under this circumstance, maximizing ROI is a necessity for surviving in the industry. To leverage your ad spends, using custom web scraping tools to obtain customer profiles for accurate ad targeting is a good start before diving into working on the ad.
Understand your customers by analyzing their profiles, such as genders, age groups, spending habits and even hobbies to make better-targeted ads based on the observed patterns. If possible, use profiles information for accurate ad targeting with aid of a custom web scraping tool.
For a traditional business like a restaurant, it’s very important to have your own specialties and find out who you’re competing with. You can improve your business and outcompete your competitors by utilizing your competitors’ menu, review, rating, and price from famous websites such as Yelp, Swiggy, Uber eats, etc.
With this information scraped by a custom web scraping tool, you can be the person who always knows the ongoing competition and customers’ minds well. You have the information to guide you to make the right changes and improvements. Besides, you can see how your changes affect your competitors’ performances by viewing the data.
Conclusion
You can do more than just the things mentioned above. If you want to utilize the data, then your goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight. For example, conducting competitor analysis with a custom web scraping tool. If you want to save time and improve your productivity, then you should focus on valuable things. For instance, you can use the tool to scrape content and upload it to your content base automatically via API. Act now and take advantage of it now.
