As an entrepreneur, you will always be looking for ways of getting new leads. For the business to grow, you will need new customers. This will mean looking for data to analyze new opportunities and areas that can be improved. If you have an online presence, there are different data points that can be examined. You’ve probably heard of web scraping before but you’re not completely sure of how it can be applied to your business and the benefits that you stand to gain. In this post, we’re going to highlight some of the benefits of web scraping for your business.
Helps With Lead Generation
One of the greatest benefits of doing business online is how easy it is to get leads. For you to get these leads, you will need to know where your potential audience is spending most of their time and the different kinds of interactions that go on before they make a purchasing decision. If you’re in such a predicament, you might need to scrape the web for relevant data that can be used for decision making. You don’t have to develop a web crawler which is not only time-consuming but is an expensive undertaking. The alternative would be to look for companies like Zenscrape that have experience developing scalable and robust web crawlers.
With web scraping, you can set some certain variables like age, location, gender, and job position as attributes to be considered in the crawling.
Cost-Efficient
Can you imagine how much it would cost to look for information on an individual variable over the internet? You could be looking for information for a particular geolocation and you will have to go through every individual website appearing on the SERPs. That means you will have to pay hundreds of people to collect the data and there are bound to be a lot of redundancies and inaccuracies. When things are done in bulk, the costs will significantly reduce which will ultimately reduce the overhead costs in business. Web crawling will also cut down on the man-hours that would have gone in trying to mine the data.
High Speeds
One of the main advantages of using a web crawler is the high speed of operations. As long as you’re using proxies, you can crawl thousands of pages in seconds. What might have taken a human weeks to accomplish can be completed in a few hours when you’re using a web crawler.
Scalable
You might be using old school techniques to scrape the internet but they might no longer work with the ever-increasing demands of a business. A web scraper is scalable and can be used even for advanced crawling. You just have to make sure you’re getting a reliable vendor for the job.
Highly Efficient
With a web scraper, you just have to input the predetermined variables and you let the software do the work. Websites are constantly doing changes and a good vendor will always be updating the software to ensure that the changes are being addressed. With a web crawler, you can extract data at the domain level and there is no single piece of information that will be left out.
Low Maintenance
Maintaining a web scraper is not as hard or complicated as a lot of people think. As long as the web crawler was not an in-house project, it will be the responsibility of the vendor to do the maintenance. There are vendors that offer subscription services for the services while others just do a one-off. Make sure to identify your business needs before you settle on a particular vendor.
Consistency and Organization
With a data crawler, the deployment will continue to extract data until it is finished or commanded to stop. The data can also be organized in a logical format so that it is easily understandable for the business. The scraper can also be programmed to crawl a particular website whenever new data is uploaded.
Uses of a Data Crawler in a Business
Data crawling allows for a business to collect relevant data which can come in handy for decision making. There will come a time where you will have to look for a data scraping solution for your business. If you’re just starting out, it is better that you look for a standard solution. Developing a crawler from scratch will be resource-intensive. There is also the maintenance aspect to worry about. Look for vendors that have a track record for reliability and consistency.