Web Scraping typical use cases
For what web scraping is used?
Web scraping can be used for a wide range of purposes such as gathering market intelligence, monitoring competitors’ prices, creating targeted marketing campaigns, and much more. It can also be used for various research projects such as sentiment analysis or finding trends in customer behavior on social media platforms like Twitter or Reddit. And finally, it can be useful for personal projects such as building a portfolio website or analyzing financial markets using historical stock prices from different sources online.
Web scraping and competitive intelligence
As we said in the article Can I scrape any public data? the web is a great source of data and this is especially true when we think about the number of e-commerce websites actually online.
E-commerce websites are one of the favorite targets for web scraping since they offer a digital representation of an economy that, without e-commerce, could have been tracked with difficulty.
Prices, product distribution, the share of shelf, discounts, and price monitoring of company products and its competitors are only examples of the wide range of analysis made possible by the scraping of e-commerce websites.
Web scraping and sentiment analysis
Social networks are another huge source of data that just needs to be read carefully, as we have seen in this article.
They can be used to synthesize what people are saying on the web about a brand, a person, or an event, and this was something unthinkable twenty years ago, in the pre-social media world.
Web scraping for tracking the economy
Not only e-commerce can be tracked but also real estate websites. In this case, web scraping can be used to look for a local bargain or have a wider look over the world for tracking the economy in real-time. Another index for tracking the economy is the scraping of the job posting market, tracking job offers growth or sinking, per each industry sector, can give great evidence of how the economy is going.
Final remarks on web scraping use cases
In conclusion, web scraping is a powerful tool that allows you to collect large amounts of structured data quickly and easily from websites all over the internet. It’s an invaluable tool for professionals working in fields such as marketing, finance, research, logistics and many others who need access to accurate up-to-date information on demand. For website owners and developers alike, web scraping provides an efficient way to monitor their sites while simultaneously providing valuable insights into their customers' needs and preferences so they can better serve them in the future. Whether you're just getting started with web scraping or looking to take your skillset even further – there are plenty of opportunities available!
Want to know more? Here’s a brief video by Oxylabs that shows us some use cases about web scraping.
This post is written by Pierluigi Vinciguerra (pier@thewebscraping.club)