Well, it’s puzzling to discover how market research automation via web scraping should be preferred over manual research. Certainly, automation is a part of digitalisation, and it powers the digital model of corporate life. The reason is cutthroat competition, which presses businesses to stay updated with market trends. And it’s no longer an option, but essential.
Businesses and multiple organizations, these days, are now looking for data, which is the research. And this research will be lengthy if you do it manually. On top of it, you need to add some more time for analysts who would extract relevant insights into trends, customers, or whatever you want to learn to make smart and informed outsourced web scraping decisions. The lengthier the research process, the more delayed decisions will be. And many a time, those decisions do not fit perfectly, as they become obsolete because of the lengthy research process. So, what’s the solution? It’s indeed hidden in market research automation.
Market research automation is the process of extracting real-time data from resources like applications, websites, and social media via AI or smart tools. Simply put, this automated technique of getting market insights into pricing trends, customer behaviour, competitor performance, product availability, and more is market research automation. It allows you to extract desirable data from sources in real time to collect, analyze, and act upon it for faster, scalable, and more accurate decisions.
Why Manual Monitoring Is No Longer Sustainable
Manual research is cost-effective for small-scale data analysis. As its volume & variety increase, this method proves incapable. Though it will work, the trend will be off till the time it is discovered. So, its inability to match the speed of transforming trends is its biggest downside.
Consider a case of competitor prices, which may shift almost every day. Consumers’ sentiments evolve and come down with every viral tweet. In these cases, manual research cannot match the pace of automated research. It may delay decisions, and you may lose some golden opportunities to scale up. Organizations leveraging real-time analytics witness up to 20% improvement in their production or growth rate, according to a McKinsey report. This is a competitive edge that data adds.
Significant Role of Web Scraping in Market Research
Web extraction is to scrape data from websites, which can be:
- E-commerce platforms: Renowned e-commerce websites like Amazon, Walmart, Flipkart, etc. Show updated pricing of products, which helps in competitor pricing and product listings analysis or upgrades.
- Review sites: Some trusted review websites like Glassdoor, Yelp, and Trustpilot can be extracted to mine the sentiments of the reviewers.
- Social media: It’s like a walkover to dive into emerging trends with data extracted from some popular social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.
- Job boards: To discover recruitment trends or signals, scraping data from Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, and other regional portals can be a great help.
- News outlets: Some marketplaces can help extract data for market and economic developments.
Overall, data scraping can be automated hourly, daily, or weekly to gain timely and actionable insights with minimal human interference.
What are the Key Benefits of Automating Market Research with Web Scraping
Now that you have learned the significance of automated market research, let’s step into the advantages of automating market research with web scraping.
- Scalability: Scalability is to expand the limit. Manual data monitoring is limited, as the number of analysts is countable in small organisations. Automation can make web scraping easier as it can extract data from thousands of URLs in minutes. So, lean businesses or startups can monitor industrial trends, categories, and competitors in minutes via digital tools that extract and transform data into analytics-ready databases.
- Accuracy & Consistency: Unlike humans, AI scripts or tools do not feel strained. These scripts religiously follow steps without missing a beat. This kind of proper setup powers the web scraping process, which consistently and accurately proceeds with data collection for research without making a single mistake. Some advanced tools can also be there to clean it up for making it ready to analyse.
- Real-Time Insights: Automated scraping tools like Octo parse or Parse Hub can be introduced to track prices, reviews, or brand mentions in real time. These crucial details inform brands to react immediately to changes, like a sudden spike in demand, reputation risks, etc.
- Custom Data Extraction: Another substantial benefit is associated with customization. You can extract desirable data via automation in minutes. Just input only the data fields resonating with your objective. It can be related to price, products, catalogue, user ratings, or job listings.
- Cost Efficiency: Regarding costing, setting up scraping tools requires an initial investment. But this is just a one-time investment, which will continue to collect data from desirable sources online. And eventually, the steady analysis will add to ROI in the long term. So, this option gives businesses an opportunity to save on labour costs, reduce human errors, and make decisions faster.
Practical Use Cases of Web Scraping in Market Research
Let’s introduce you to some real-life cases where web data extraction is helping researchers to understand the market and follow trends accordingly.
- Competitor Price Tracking: E-commerce companies or online sellers use automated scraping tools to understand how to set up competitive prices for their products. It enables them to build dynamic pricing strategies, which makes them more competitive in the market.
- Consumer Sentiment Analysis: Understanding emotions is a tricky task that needs data from reviews and comments from social media. These datasets consist of their pain points, preferences, and brand perception. These are some key details that help in developing a unique and highly competitive product and improve customer service.
- Trend Discovery: To discover trends, extracting details from blogs, industry forums, and news portals can be helpful. Marketers can find necessary details about consumer trends or rising product categories way before they become popular.
- Inventory Monitoring: Extracting product details from the inventory of an e-commerce website can help it discover which stock is competitive and surplus, and which one is running out of stock. These details help the supply chain partner or department to plan and spot demand surges and keep the stock in.
- Hiring & Expansion Intelligence: Consider the case of a recruitment company or HR department. Job posting updates can be extracted. It will guide in discovering expansion plans, technology requirements, and organisational priorities.
Tools for Automated Market Research via Web Scraping
However, many tools are available online, which can be free and premium, for non-coders also. For example:
- Octoparse: This tool requires no formal technical knowledge. It’s a user-friendly tool that comes with templates for social media and e-commerce data extraction.
- ParseHub: This is recommended for web data extraction from complex websites.
- Scrapy: It’s a code-based open-source framework that can help in extracting large-scale data from websites.
Ethical & Legal Considerations
The use of data makes scraping tools an excellent choice to leverage. But these tools must be used responsibly. Ensure while using that
- You follow the website’s terms of service.
- You do not overload servers, ensuring rate limits and proper headers.
- You comply with robots.txt rules.
- You avoid collecting personally identifiable information (PII) without consent from data subjects.
- The purpose of your market research is legitimate, but not spam.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, it is proven that manual market research is sluggish. Automation adds speed to it, ensuring faster, smarter, and more reliable data resonating with your corporate goals. You can automate data collection by deploying automatic tools for web data collection. And then, make it hasty to discover insights for informed strategies or planning to boost your business.
