The most important aspect of building a successful business is developing a loyal customer base through meeting customer needs. Customer data analytics, the collection and analysis of customer data (sales, reviews, demographics, etc), is the best way to improve customer relations. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a web page, is the most convenient tool for extracting and collecting customer data online. In addition to fulfilling customer needs, this process generates insights that can help you make data-driven decisions towards the future, expand your online influence, and get ahead of your competition.

If you know the basics of customer data, then use the table of contents below to discover how Scraping Robot’s scraping tools and API help you get the most out of your customer data analysis.

What is Customer Web Data?

Customer web data is online data related to customer sales, reviews, and demographics. Once extracted and collected from web pages, this data can be put through customer data analysis in order to yield valuable insights for organizations. With proper analysis, you’ll discover how to meet consumer needs, plan for the future, and expand your influence online. Additionally, all the same analysis processes can also be used on competitor data in order to understand how you compare to your largest competitors. With both customer data on your own organization and competing ones, you’ll have a sense of the entire market you’re working within.

How to Do Customer Data Collection

All online data can be manually extracted and organized, yet it takes lots of time, money, and workers. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a web page, is the best method for extracting data quickly, safely, and for little cost. Because you’ll be saving time and energy using a web scraping tool, your organization will have more time to analyze data and share valuable insights with team members, business partners, or consultants.

Customer Web Scraping

Scraping Robot’s web scraping modules are built to work with a variety of web pages. The HTML scraper can be used with any html link, while other modules are built specifically to parse through data on Amazon, eBay, and other online retailers. Inputting the web page link into a scraper, you’ll receive the entire web page as data as output. With a general scraper, you’ll have to use other programs to organize and analyze the data. With modules built for specific sites, the data will be easily organized and can then be analyzed.

The Benefits of Customer Data Analysis

There are many benefits to analyzing customer web scraping. Here are just a few of the things you’ll learn from customer data analytics.

Meet customer needs

For lots of organizations, meeting consumer needs is on the top of the priority list. When you scrape customer data, you learn more about their desires and general background which makes it easier to appeal to their needs. For example, customer data includes demographic information (Age, Gender, etc). With this information, you can understand your target audience and therefore create marketing campaigns or new products suited to their desires. Without knowing your audience, it can feel like you’re selling to faceless online transactions. Web scraping makes customers accessible so that you better understand their interests.

Social media is a great place to learn more about how customers feel about specific issues. For example, if you scrape your Twitter followers, then you’ll discover their followers, following, and biographic information. This data informs you of their interests and connections. Scraping trending topic pages is a way to understand if your followers/customers are invested in certain issues, such as climate change. If you learn your target audience skews younger and more climate conscious, then making your product, packaging, or production process more sustainable is going to appeal to them and their friends as well.

Plan for the future

While scraping is useful for understanding the state of your organization, it is also about moving towards the future. Scraping customer data is a way to track changes in both customer attitudes and the industry as a whole. Similar to scraping social media for consumer views on topics such as climate change, social media opinions are important to understand how public values are shifting. With the example of climate change, the immediate shift to meet customer needs is creating a more sustainable process right now. In the long term, this same customer data point can be used to make sustainable decisions in the future because you now know customers desire it. Therefore, it is important to look beyond the current product or project by analyzing subjective data regarding general trends in values, markets, and more.

The more valuable data you collect about your customers through the years, the clearer the image becomes about the people who are buying from you. How have they changed? What has stayed the same? This data can help you better understand your customers by showing you how their habits and desires have changed. When you identify historical patterns in customer behavior, you can bring more value to your customers.

Expand your reach

Once you understand your customers current and shifting desires, you can conduct more meaningful outreach through marketing and social media strategy. Understanding your target demographic through customer web data makes it easier to create marketing strategies in the future that appeal to this audience. With the additional demographic data scraped from social media websites like Twitter, you’ll be able to target those marketing campaigns towards those most likely to respond and ultimately make a purchase. Targeted marketing is more effective than traditional ads where you have less control over the audience for the advertisement.

In addition to using social media marketing strategies, forming an online community is a great way for an organization or brand to expand their influence. Finding influencers important to your customer base (by scraping followers) or discovering popular trends can make it easier to build an online brand. For example, if you are trying to appeal to a younger customer base, then participating in online challenges, memes, or posing questions to followers can make your brand more interactive for younger followers and therefore more popular than brands that simply post traditional ads.

How to Improve Customer Data Analytics

Web scraping is a great way for an organization to analyze its current state and move towards the future through data-driven decision making. However, these same strategies can be applied to major competitors in order to understand how to learn from their success and avoid their mistakes.

Get ahead of the competition

Scraping competitor websites and social media profiles gives you access to data regarding product, prices, customer sentiment, and more. Essentially, using a web scraping tool to extract similar customer data makes it easy to compare your organization to the competition. While every organization is different, comparing yourself to the competition is useful in predicting and understanding industry norms and trends.

For example, if you know that you and your competitors all struggled in the same way then it is easier to understand what shifts are in and out of your organization’s control. If you don’t scrape competitor data, then you may end up applying individual solutions to an industry wide problem without proper consideration. To ensure you get the most out of your organization’s customer web analysis, you must also scrape relevant competitor data to get a proper sense of context for the industry.

Scraping Robot API

When you scrape for data from multiple organizations and websites, it can easily become too much to handle. Big customer data analytics contains more data than many organizational data departments are used to working with. The Scraping Robot API makes it easier than ever to directly input multiple data sources into the same analysis programs. Therefore, you’ll be saving tons of time, money, and energy that would normally be spent separating and organizing data sources.

Additionally, you’ll get access to our Scraping Robot team who are dedicated to creating scraping solutions that fit your specific data needs as well as managing development of proxies and scraping securely. If this sounds like a good fit for your organization, check out our API page for more information.