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Web scraping scrapes every piece of information you require from the beautiful world of the internet and gives it to you in a format that you find most useful. Yes, it is that cool. And what kicks it up a notch is real-time scraping. Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day. Data is literally getting antiquated by the second; the latest developments hold the most weightage. Enter dynamic web scraping or real-time data scraping. It helps you make better decisions. Faster decisions.
But what is real-time data scraping? Real-time web scraping means repeatedly and regularly repeating the entire process of scraping a website each time the source web page changes its data or adds another data to its site. This is your true ticket to missing nothing that gets uploaded at any point in time.
Real Time Web Scraping – The Advantage
Real time web scraping is almost like a prerequisite for any web scraper as most web pages are subject to frequent structural changes, format changes, and content updation. Keeping up with the plethora of changes is only possible by a dynamic or real-time web data scraper. Some examples of data that need constant updation are weather, stock market, flight and hotel prices, etc. They need to be constantly monitored so that the user can get real time data on the latest figures. Data gets old by the second!
Why is Capturing Real Time Data Important
The answer is relatively intuitive. You have better data points to draw insights from. Which in turn helps you act better and faster. The more specific benefits are:
1) Make Better Decisions, Faster
You can always stay ahead of the competition and continue staying in vogue and conversations with your consumers online by equipping yourself with dynamic data. The time lag between cause and effect can significantly reduce with updated information handy. Speed is everything. You run a significant risk of turning obsolete by ignoring the importance of speed in business. High-velocity decision-making is key to staying abreast.
2) Build an Exhaustive Database
The volume of data available on the world wide web is exorbitant. None of which can be negated. You always need to have a holistic view of anything. How is this possible? Yes, you guessed it right. Real time scraping to keep updating your database with the latest development constantly. Extracting data continuously is the magic phrase, since data is significantly time-sensitive. Even the changes in the same thread of data over the years can provide a distinctive edge in business decisions. With the daily shuffle, the micro-decisions can be taken care of. With the insights drawn from patterns that emerge, long-term business objectives can be set flawlessly.
3) Create an Agile and Autonomous System
The bigger goal and ultimate objective is to build an analytic data system that is self-serving. This means that the system is adaptive and independent of human intervention. With the massive amount of data that is being served to your analytic system daily, it naturally learns to identify trends and patterns and draws appropriate regression models to predict the future. By eliminating the need to have a human do this, we eliminate high costs, wasted resources, and human error. Think Elon Musk and the self-driving car we all await!
Real Time Data Scraping for Business Growth
Dynamic data analytics can be applied in various situations to facilitate business development. Some of them are:
1) Competitor Analysis
What product you should launch and at what price can quickly be answered by scraping competition data. This will also give you an idea about your target audience and how they engage with content at each stage of their purchase journey. Product descriptions can be dynamically scraped to understand keywords and search engine optimization. And the most under-tapped customer sentiment by dynamically scraping customer reviews. All of these data points put together make for a heady concoction of the sure-shot recipe of success. Keeping an eye out for what everybody else is doing daily will help you beat them at their own game.
2) Customer Relationship and Experience Management
They say that customers are king but never has it been given due weightage until now. For two reasons, a) they can move to your competitor, b) they have many platforms to voice their grievances. Sentiment analysis in real time is disaster management 101. By constantly monitoring what your consumers are saying about you, especially the negative bits, you can do significant crisis control. And swing it in your favour.
3) Developing Marketing Strategies
Real time data analysis helps you draw insights from past data and the freshest data available. This way, you can study the whole pattern that emerges and develop regression models accordingly. You can then what your audience is talking about and on which platform and join in that conversation and gain immense visibility.
How to Access Real Time Data
Manually copy-pasting is no longer an option. We have come a long way from that. A premium web scraping service is what your business truly needs. With a premium web scraping service, extracting real time data is hassle-proof. To reiterate the benefits further:
No Prior Knowledge of Coding – With a reputable data scraping service, you don’t need to have prior programming knowledge. Scraping dynamic data from the world wide web is then left to people who are indeed experts in the field, leaving you to concentrate on other tasks.
It Works Beautifully for All Websites – Each website is different from another. A service needs to recognize and understand the structure of the website before it starts scraping. A premium web scraping service will study the website and start scraping it without any roadblocks within seconds.
The Biggest Game-Changer: Scheduled Extractions – This is what separates regular data scraping and real time data scraping. A real time data scraping service will scrape data as intermittently as you want. You can set the schedule. It will just keep enriching your database.
At the very pace, we are moving at in businesses; we need to keep refreshing our data stream constantly.
