In today’s highly competitive business landscape, staying ahead is a constant struggle for all organizations. To achieve this, businesses need to be updated with the latest information about the market, customers and competitors. Gathering information about any of these is known as market research.
Whether you are launching a new product or improving an existing one, market research is essential to understand market trend and user perception. Traditionally, user interviews, surveys and focus group discussions are used to gather this information. However, today, most of this information can be obtained online. The biggest challenge market researchers face is gathering all this data. With the help of web scraping, market researchers can now easily find the most relevant market analysis data from various websites and efficiently conduct market research at scale.
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What is Market Research?
Market Research has been the cornerstone of all industries for organizations to follow the pulse of how the market is changing. Through market research, businesses understand their customers’ sentiment, monitor prices, plan product launches and conduct competitor analysis.
In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the most common market research use cases and how web scraping can help you get accurate market information quickly.
Some common market research use cases:
- Customer Sentiment Analysis: For any business, it is important to know what their customers think about the products or services they offer. This information is vital for planning product updates, new product development, or even messaging around their products. Earlier, this information was obtained through customer surveys and focus group discussions. However, with the advent of social media, many companies have turned to analyzing user sentiment online. With the help of an effective web scraping tool, any organization can write down what their customers are saying about their products on social media and plan their product strategies accordingly.
- Trend Analysis: Trend analysis is carried out to understand the different market scenarios that could play out at different times and the environment prevailing in the industry at any given time. This exercise requires the collection of a large amount of data and, if done manually using traditional methods, can be very time-consuming and error-prone. With the help of web scraping, this market research use case can be completed much faster, achieving data at a much higher level of accuracy.
- Competitor Analysis: Staying one step ahead of the competition is critical to success in business. And the only way to stay ahead is to constantly monitor the competition. Traditionally, businesses have used manual competitor research methods. However, these methods are extremely time-consuming and error-prone as they are not heavily data-driven. By harnessing the power of web scraping for market research, organizations can quickly and accurately gather vast amounts of data about their competitors.
- Price tracking: Accurate product pricing is key to competitive success. If you price your product much higher than the competition, you can’t make sales. But if your price is much lower than the competition, you lose available profit. Therefore, knowing the prices charged by competitors is crucial. However, this exercise can be time-consuming depending on the number of products or services offered and the number of competitors in the market. Also, price monitoring has to be done regularly, making it even more difficult. However, web scraping can make price tracking a very simple process. You can have up-to-date information at your fingertips within minutes. Additionally, advanced web scraping tools can be automated to run regularly, ensuring you always have up-to-date prices.
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Benefits of web scraping for market research
Fast and affordable data collection
Market research data collected through web scraping saves a lot of time for organizations as it can be achieved in minutes. In addition, this is a very affordable method.
Ease of use
Advanced web scraping tools are quite simple to use. All they require is the target URL and the data to be extracted from that web page. Once they have it, they will quickly extract this data into the desired output format.
Keep track of market changes
Web scraping for market research should be done regularly to ensure the most accurate information. Advanced web scraping tools like Nanonets can automate workflows to ensure the latest information is always available.
How to web scrape for market research?
Web scraping for market research consists of 4 main steps. These steps remain the same no matter what industry or use case you may have. The only thing that needs to be changed is that the data is removed from the target site based on your requirements.
#Step 1: Determine the required data
Before starting the web scraping process, it is important to understand what information is required. Based on market research, the data needed may be that of competitors or customer sentiment about your product or service. Having this information ready before you start scraping sites can be very helpful.
#Step 2: Shortlist data sources
Once you know what data you want, it’s time to determine where to get it. Data is usually extracted from competitor websites, e-commerce platforms, business listings or social media platforms. Before scraping data from a website, ensure the quality of the data and check the terms of service to ensure data scraping is allowed.
#Step 3: Decide on the web scraper
The next step is to choose which web scraper will serve you best. Many web scrapers can help you extract relevant information from websites. Deciding which is important to ensure you get accurate data from this process.
#Step 4: Format the data structure
Finally, data exported from a website can be in different formats, such as Excel, text or even XML. The final step in this process is to convert this unstructured data into a structured format and upload it to your market research tool. Many advanced data scraping tools like Nanonets can automate this whole process for you.
Eliminate the bottlenecks caused by manually scraping data from websites. Learn how Nanonets can help you remove data from websites automatically.
Web scraping for market research with Nanonets
Nanonets is an AI-powered data extraction software for businesses that want to automate processes and eliminate manual tasks using code-free workflow automation. Nanonets can scrape data from websites and extract data from PDF files, documents, images, emails, scanned documents or unstructured data sets with greater than 95% accuracy.
Nanonets workflow automation can automate the entire workflow, from collecting data from a site to structuring it and uploading it to the relevant site.
Watch the demo video below to learn how the Nanonets workflow can help automate website data extraction.
Web Scraping with Nanonets
Advantages of using Nanonets –
- Handy
- 97%+ Accurate
- Great support team
- Quick information recognition
- Ability to download large volumes of documents
- Reasonable pricing – Check pricing
- 200+ languages supported
- 24×7 customer support
- Free plans + cost-effective pricing plans
- Personal training sessions
- Built-in powerful OCR software
- Cloud and On-premise hosting
- White label options
Legal and Ethical Considerations
While web scraping itself isn’t illegal, especially for publicly available data on a website, it’s important to tread carefully to avoid legal and ethical issues.
The key is to respect the rules of the site. The Terms of Service (TOS) and robots.txt file may limit scraping altogether or outline acceptable practices such as how often you can request data to avoid overwhelming their servers. Additionally, certain types of data are off-limits, such as copyrighted content or personal information without someone’s consent. Data scraping regulations like GDPR (Europe) and CCPA (California) add another layer of complexity.
Finally, web scraping for malicious purposes, such as stealing login credentials or crashing a website, is a clear no-no. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your web scraping activities are legal and ethical.
Other Web Scraping Use Cases
Web scraping use cases go beyond simple market research. Some other popular use cases are –
conclusion
Market Research is a critical but time-consuming and resource-intensive process for all organizations. Not all businesses can afford to invest so many resources into this, so they either have to outsource it or automate it. Unfortunately, outsourcing market research can be expensive and hence the only viable solution is to do web scraping for market research.
Web scraping for market research is fast, reliable, highly scalable, and can automate an organization’s entire market research process.
Eliminate the bottlenecks caused by manually scraping data from websites. Learn how Nanonets can help you remove data from websites automatically.