There is a saying, “data is the new oil” and it’s true. Data is the most important thing an enterprise business can utilize for its research, analysis, marketing, lead generation, and development. It’s estimated that there were 44 zettabytes of data in 2020 and will reach 463 exabytes by 2025. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon have at least 1,200 petabytes of information. This data is vital for online corporations and is often monetized for advertisers. What is even more staggering is by 2030, 9 out of 10 people aged 6 and above will be online.
With so much data available, it’s important for your enterprise business to utilize web scraping so it can stay ahead of its competitors by having big data. While it may be difficult to sift through all this data, it’s important to try to get as many insights from it as possible. In this blog post, we will discuss enterprise web scraping, what it’s used for, some examples in a corporate setting, and how ParseHub can help you with web scraping.
What is Enterprise Web Scraping?
Enterprise web scraping is the process of collecting large amounts of data from public sources, which is completely legal. Using automated tools such as ParseHub, your business can scrape data from all kinds of web pages. Enterprise web scraping differs from regular web scraping, as there are usually massive amounts of data being scraped. Large amounts of data can be used by data scientists and other analytical departments within a corporation, whereas regular web scraping is usually used for simple use cases.
Some of the benefits of enterprise web scraping are that it’s a cost-effective way to gather data, it’s faster than manual methods and you can get data from sources that are difficult to access. Enterprise web scraping with ParseHub is easy, as everything is visual, so you know exactly what you’re scraping from a website. Python and other programming scripts can work well for web scraping, however, when dealing with large amounts of web pages, it becomes time-consuming to create code for every single website. Scripts are also easily detectable which makes it hard to scrape, unlike ParseHub which comes with IP Rotation amongst other features.
What Is Web Scraping Used For?
Web scraping can be used in many different ways. One example is price monitoring, to make strategic pricing decisions. By scraping competitor prices on a continual basis, businesses can make better-optimized pricing models. Social media can also be scraped for sentiment analysis and trends. Market or industry data can also be scraped and used by analytical departments to forecast trends and better equip the corporation with data to work with. Web scraping also can be used for AI, machine learning and neural networks, as vast amounts of accurate data are required for enterprise algorithms to run correctly.
Corporate Departments and Web Scraping
As we discussed earlier, there are vast amounts of data available online, which means there are many corporations that utilize web scraping. Within the corporation or enterprise, there are various departments than can utilize web scraping:
Sales Department
Lead generation is one of the top uses of web scraping. Sales teams can use scraped public information to outreach and make sales. Data that has been scraped can also be used by sales departments to forecast revenue.
Marketing Department
Data is extremely important when it comes to marketing. Spending advertising dollars in the right verticals with the right audience is key to advertising thoughtfully. Monitoring sentiment, trends and collecting competitor advertisements are some of the ways marketers can use web scraping.
Engineering Department
Various engineers, developers, and other technical departments can benefit greatly from big data. As discussed earlier, AI and machine learning can be used in conjunction with scraped data to make better decisions. Also, these algorithms can assist the engineering team with ground-breaking innovations.
Enterprise Web Scraping Advantages
There are many advantages of using a web scraper for enterprise businesses.
Improve customer experience – Customer experience is everything and by using data, you can enhance it. By understanding your customer’s wants and needs, you can create a better experience for them. This will lead to customers being more satisfied and coming back for more.
Make better decisions – With so much data available, it can be tough to make decisions. However, by utilizing data, you can make sounder decisions that are based on facts and not just gut feelings.
Create better products and services – With web scraping you can understand what your customers want, and you can create products and services that they will love. You can strategically price your offerings as well.
Improve marketing – Data can be used to improve your marketing efforts. By understanding your customer’s wants and needs, you can create better marketing campaigns that will reach them where they are most likely to convert.
Understand your competition – In order to stay ahead of your competition, you need to understand them. By using data, you can see what they are doing right and wrong. This will allow you to adjust your own strategies to stay ahead of them.
Concluding Thoughts
Putting efforts into enterprise data extraction and big data, your business can utilize web scraping to stay ahead of its competition for long-term success. However, it’s important to remember that data is only as good as its usage. Having the right corporate departments and expert employees combined with accurate data is key to success. Web scraping is proven to make your enterprise business more profitable, which is the goal of every company. Aside from profits, enterprise businesses can monitor markets, trends, and sentiments while gathering large amounts of data safely and legally with ParseHub Plus.
If you’re an enterprise company that wants to scrape large amounts of data, visit ParseHub Plus to book a call and get your free data export!