Applications of Web Scraping

Web scraping has an extensive range of applications across various industries. Here are some common use cases:

Data Collection and Analysis

• Market Research: Gathering data on competitors, pricing, product trends, and customer sentiment. (Refer to the next section for details in the context of retail tracking).
• Social Media Monitoring: Tracking brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and competitor activity on social media platforms.
• Topic Modelling: Related to the tracking of social media, topic modelling is a technique used to discover hidden themes or topics within a collection of documents by analysing the patterns of word co-occurrence.
• Financial Analysis: Extracting financial data from stock exchanges, company reports, and news articles.
• Academic Research: Collecting data for research studies on topics like public opinion, consumer behaviour, and cultural trends.

Market Research — E-commerce and Retail Tracking

A wealth of valuable information can be extracted by scraping product pages on e-commerce websites, including:

• Price: Tracking prices of products to identify pricing trends and competitive pricing.
• Promotion: Collecting causal factors such as price discount and other aspects of promotions for promotions evaluation.
• Product: Collecting information pertaining to product features and design.
• Distribution and Assortment: Monitoring distribution in terms of product availability (width of distribution) and product range (depth) across multiple suppliers.
• Inventory: Scrape product pages on e-commerce websites to check if items are in stock or out of stock.
• Stock Alerts: Set up automated alerts to notify when products become available or go out of stock. For instance, on a property website, when a new property matching certain requirements is listed.

Web Automation

• Data Entry: Automating data entry tasks by extracting information from websites and populating forms or databases.
• Web Testing: Automating testing of web applications by simulating user interactions and verifying functionality.
• Web Monitoring: Monitoring websites for changes or updates, such as price drops, product availability, or news articles.
• Bot Development: Creating bots to perform repetitive tasks on websites, such as liking posts on social media or booking appointments.

Web Development and Design

• Content Aggregation: Curating content from multiple sources and displaying it on a single platform.
• Website Scraping: Creating website clones or scraping content for inspiration and design reference.
• SEO Analysis: Analysing competitor websites to identify keywords, backlinks, and content strategies.

Business Case Examples

Web scraping is widely utilised across various industries; here are some notable examples:

• Search Engines: Google and other search engines crawl billions of web pages to rank them effectively in search results.
• Real Estate Analysis: Collecting data on property listings, prices, and market trends.
• Job Hunting: Scraping job boards to find relevant job postings.
• News Aggregation: Curating news articles from various sources and presenting them in a single feed.
• Industry Statistics & Insights: Market researchers scrape and analyse data for insights and reports.
• Comparison Sites: These online platforms aggregate and compare product information, prices, and features from various retailers or providers. They cover a wide range of categories, including consumer goods (like fast-moving consumer goods, durables, and automobiles), financial services (such as mortgage rates and insurance premiums), and utilities (like fuel prices).
• Lead Generation: Businesses collect contact information about potential customers or clients.
• Social Media Sentiment Analysis: Marketers and politicians scrape posts to gauge public sentiment when APIs are not available.
• Travel Planning: Collecting information on flights, hotels, and attractions for travel planning.