How to Use Web Scraping: 7 Use Cases For Your Business

Anda Miuțescu on May 10 2021

You know, we have addressed Web Scraping in so many articles by now. You might be wondering if there is something more to cover.

The answer will always be YES!

Web scraping info or business-related subjects, we are here to talk about them all and how they connect one to another.

In this article, we will describe the most common situations in which businesses rely on web scraping. We will come up with some pretty good examples that hopefully will help you decide to use WebScrapingAPI for your next scraping adventure!

Use cases for web scraping

Web scraping can have multiple goals, considering the information that needs to be extracted, its format, or for which industry. What keeps them all together is that data is essential for every business that wants to take a step forward. It definitely helps its owners make more informed and precise decisions.

But there are some standard uses of web scraping, the common ones, that usually require most of our attention.

1. Market Research

When thinking about starting a business or scaling one, market research is the most important source of information, and a good starting point, particularly in complex industries. The more data, the better. Through web scraping, businesses can access high quality, high volume, and highly insightful web data that can be a significant turning point in future decisions.

For this purpose, using an API scraper on relevant websites, you can run market trend analysis, market pricing, and optimizing point of entry, or you can use the data for research and development goals. All these start from the information you can extract and download in a very malleable format by using a web scraping API.

2. Price and Product Intelligence

Another typical case in which entrepreneurs or businesses decide to use web scraping technology is to gather information regarding competitors’ prices and products like available stock or product description. This is a common practice that can ensure business growth and continuity by automating pricing strategies and market positioning.

For example, frequent uses of our product, WebScrapingAPI, in price intelligence include dynamic pricing, revenue optimization, product trend monitoring, and brand and MAP (minimum advertised price) compliance.

3. Lead Generation

Having access to a possible customer list for your business can be a great advantage in front of competitors. Doing this the hard way (with copy and paste) it’s going to take a while.

That’s why businesses use web scraping: finding websites with multiple contacts, making a request based on their needs, and downloading the data into a single file. Or advice: reproduce these steps until you reach the desired results. After that, you can analyze and get the most out of the extracted data in whatever way you want.

We are helping you with a shortlist of where you can start your search:

• LinkedIn
• Clutch
• The Yellowpages
• Glassdoor
• Amazon seller profiles

4. Competitor Analysis

For every new business that is not reinventing the wheel, there are multiple competitors on the market that offer different services, at different prices, with different approaches. Keeping an active eye on them all sounds like an exhausting task for any human being, most likely if you are in a dynamic industry like e-commerce.

Here’s where web scraping tools come to help. Using a scraping API on all relevant URLs (their features, prices, and landing pages plus their social media accounts, or any other variables that you want), you’ll create a report on each competitor in record time.

The most significant advantage comes once you aggregate the data on all companies. At that point, you will have an overview of the market, and you can determine averages and identify untapped opportunities.

5. Brand Monitoring

The idea of knowing how people feel and think about businesses started to grow in owners’ minds, making them search all over the Internet for reviews and social media interactions.

In this case, the incredible power of the Internet can be a burden. Imagine scrolling over thousands of websites in search of proof that customers love or hate your product. Using a web scraping API, marketing and PR teams can keep track of all these feelings and opinions.

WebScrapingAPI collects information much faster, and stores requested data in a standardized format. As a result, it’s much easier to calculate general opinion, compare with past intervals and identify trends and unhappy customers.

6. Real Estate

This industry has known a digital transformation, which led to a disruption of traditional companies. As in every other industry, available data helps agents and brokerages make informed decisions.

If you target notable acquisitions for investment purposes, collecting available data improves your searches and helps you find better offers. WebScrapingAPI can help you reach the best you can find on the Internet with just a few clicks.

In conclusion, web scraping helps businesses appraise property value, monitor vacancy rates, estimate rental yields, and understand market direction.

7. Financing and Investing

The process of making informed investment decisions can be a very time-consuming one. Using web scraping as a strategic value to ease the process, helps to make informed decisions based on accurate data available online, and compile different information sources to assess risks and opportunities.

Using web scraping for financial data, you can extract insights from SEC filings, estimate company fundamentals, have an overview of public sentiment, and monitor the news.

Wrapping it up

As we’ve already noticed, multiple industries and areas could benefit from using web scraping in order to grow healthier, wealthier, and more performant businesses.

Our main goal is to help and guide you and business owners in making informed decisions based on facts and data that you can easily extract using WebScrapingAPI.

Learn more about our product and start your journey with 1000 free API calls!