How web scraping can help in Marketing Analytics

Introduction

Marketers use various strategies to gather knowledge and analyze marketing tactics to understand the performance and subsequent success or failure of their ventures. Market analytics allow more efficiency and negate wastes of both time and money. Market Analytics guarantees customer satisfaction. Let us now have a look at how web scraping helps marketing analytics.

Marketers cannot just make use of their intuition to bring in more customers and profits. A logical, data-backed program that has room for comparison and evaluation is best. It has many advantages:

It accurately locates marketing initiatives that work, and ones that fail. Thus, mistakes are not committed twice.

Studying and analyzing marketing trends for a while can help acquire a better understanding of the market and can also aid you in deciding which trends to subsequently work upon.

It also helps in understanding the return on investment (ROI) and thus one can calculate the effectiveness of any marketing strategy.

With enough data and practice, it can also help in predicting the outcome of a marketing strategy.

The overall growth of the company is due to the expenses saved by marketing analytics

Uses of web scraping in Marketing Analytics

While there are many ways in which web scraping can boost marketing analytics, we have described a few commonly used methods-

Deciding on the price of a product can be a daunting task. If customers find the same product on a different site with a comparatively lower price, they will flock to that site and you will incur losses. This can be remedied by data crawling from the website of your competitor and analyzing it to know which items sell better. Thus, you will be more equipped to price your product. A marketing campaign that displays the items with their prices will then bring in more traffic.

Social Media governs today’s world and the brand image of the company is very important. A conscious society that watches your every step and consequently rewards or punishes you entails that you protect that image. That is where web scraping comes in. By comparing both good and bad reviews on metrics such as a new product launch, marketing strategy, rise in a product price, etc., you will be able to leverage public opinion.

Nothing sells a product better than a relatable marketing strategy. To do so, scraping demographic data becomes very important. For example, a fruit drink is advertised simply as a delicious beverage with cartoon animals in the background to kids; to mothers, it is advertised as a healthier alternative with loads of nutrients. Catering to select sections of the society based on their age or gender by understanding their wants is possible through the web scraping service.

Historical data becomes very relevant to understand how to proceed with a marketing campaign. Scraping data related to previous marketing campaigns by companies can help find specific campaigns that caused a rise or fall in share prices. This can help you to make better decisions for making new plans. Previous marketing and advertisement fail include tweeting about one cell-phone brand from a different cell-phone, changing a favored logo, as well as other failures like these that teach you how not to market your product and brand. You can also learn from positive campaigns and successful marketing strategies so that your ideas are based on data, and the outcomes are predictable.

Using data scraped from different websites, you can create a real-time dashboard that your marketing team can use. The dashboard can have multiple sections dedicated to different data-feeds. It can have a live-feed that shows new marketing campaigns that your competitors have taken on and are getting media coverage. You can have a pie chart showing the fraction of social media posts mentioning your company vs other companies. These are the companies that operate in the same niche or the same industry.

Analyzing keywords is an important part of marketing efforts. Understanding which keywords need to be incorporated into your website and posts can lead to more organic hits and conversions. You also need to keep track of your organic hits vs the sponsored hits on your website. And we need to make sure that the percentage of organic traffic is higher. As per reports, around 70-80% of the people ignore paid advertisements and prefer organic search results.

Competitor Analysis

Auditing your competitor’s SEO strategy is necessary. SEO crawling needs to be done on data scraped from websites to uncover popular words. Landing pages need to be analyzed to gain more insights into why certain websites are at a higher SEO ranking. Not only do you need to look into what they are doing right, but you also need to look into keywords that are being ignored by them. Some keywords are very relevant to the industry. Keywords ignored by our competitors will be targeted. We can build on the strategy left behind by our competitors.

A large number of people believe as much as in online reviews as they do in an actual recommendation. A large number of people still view online reviews before ordering from a business. Scraping social media data is fine, but you also need to crawl reviews (both your own and your competitor’s). For example, if you are a restaurant, you need to crawl Zomato for reviews on your restaurant and others in the locality. People can give their feedback on what they love and hate. You can analyze the data to find commonalities and understand the pain point. The marketing campaign can contain these pain points along with its solutions. Customers love nothing more than a company that counts their opinion.

Conclusion

Data-driven decision making has crept into most sectors and industries. Marketing is no different. Marketing analytics has helped cut costs, made marketing efforts more efficient and made it easier to analyze the results. However, getting the data remains a challenge unless you tap into web-scraping both conventional and unconventional data sources. If you want to build your web scraping team to support your marketing efforts, the cost might be too high to benefit you in a matter of years. That is unless you already have a data-scraping team supporting your other departments. In the former scenario, you should use the web scraping services of well-established teams like ours at PromptCloud. We provide data along with a complete managed end to end solution that can be used in a plug and play format.