Web Scraping Skills for
Survival in the Post-COVID-19 World
The Covid-19 pandemic has proved to be a major setback for the world’s economy. Most businesses have been closed down, and many have shifted to a WFH model. As a result, recession, decreased payment, less the number of working hours, and other associated issues have crept in. With no money to spend on brands’ promotion, or to organize physical campaigns, conferences or events, businesses are suffering from reduced sales. In such hard times, companies need to come up with new business strategies, and brand monitoring techniques.
As everyone has shifted to an online mode of working, data analytics and data extraction appear to be new means of survival in the post-covid world. With the help of web scraping, brands can overcome the difficulties they are facing as data is what matters the most in the digital world.
But before getting into the details, let’s first know what web scraping is in detail.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a process that uses bots or software to extract large amounts of data from different websites or online sources. The data extracted is used for different purposes including data analytics, sentimental analysis, SEO monitoring, brand monitoring, and for business strategizing.
However, there are chances of facing the problems of IP blocking or geo-restrictions if you scrape data using bots or other software. Why is this so? When multiple requests are received by a website from which the data is extracted or has to be extracted, there are possibilities that it blocks you. It is because of the unusual behavior of bots that the website cannot identify with that of a “human” behavior. As a result, your IP gets blocked.
To solve this problem, one needs to use proxies. Let’s see how proxies help in web scraping.
How Proxies Help in Web Scraping?
Proxy servers have different IPs that are used to mask or hide your real IP. In this way, proxies not only hide your real identity, but also mimics “human” behavior. As a result, it becomes difficult for the sites with robust security to identify proxies. In this way, you are able to bypass IP blocking and send multiple requests for data extraction.
Moreover, a web scraping proxy service uses different or unique IPs for every data request. In some cases, such as rotating residential proxies, IP addresses get rotated or switched every 10 minutes. Hence, it becomes challenging for the websites to track down your IP address or flag it as inappropriate.
Now let’s see how web scraping can boost the economy in the post-covid world.
How Can Web Scraping Help Brands Grow?
Web scraping can prove to be incredibly beneficial in enhancing your brand’s growth in the post-covid world. If you have the right web scraping skills and tools, you can definitely survive once the pandemic gets over. Web scraping can really help your brand by assisting you in gathering relevant information, learning about your competitor’s business strategies, in brand monitoring, or conducting sentimental analysis to know what people think of your product or service.
Below are the different ways in which web scraping can help your brand.
Data Extraction: Data extraction is a highly important task for any company, especially if the company is operating online. With the help of data extracting software, companies collect relevant information from different sources and websites. The retrieved data is then stored in the data warehouse for further analysis. This analysis could be conducted to determine the ongoing trends in the market, to create marketing and business strategies, to keep track of sales, and much more.
Business Strategies: Web scraping is extremely effective in curating workable business strategies. Most companies extract data to know about the competition in the market in their respective fields. This data can also be analyzed by the companies to see how their competitor’s brand is doing in the market, what all strategies their competitor is following, and so on. As a result, the company can get an idea on how to improve on its current business model or strategies.
Brand Monitoring: A company can effectively monitor its brand’s growth, sales chart, public sentiments, biggest competition etc. using web scraping. The data gathered from web scraping is extremely crucial for a brand’s development. Your brand can shine in the market if you have the relevant web scraping skills used for brand monitoring.
Sentimental Analysis: Sentimental analysis is one of the biggest reasons for which companies extract data. The process of sentimental analysis helps brands to categorize public opinions or feedback on their products/services as “positive”, “neutral”, or “negative”. In this way, a company can get insights on its brand.
If WhatsApp is part of your webscraping tool set and arsenal, you’ll want to take a closer look at what softgoza has to offer.
Conclusion
The Covid-19 pandemic has adversely affected everyone. It has urged people to start their lives, both personal and professional, in completely new ways. As a result, WFH and remote working using online resources has become the new normal. However, the backlash faced by the world’s economy due to the pandemic is severe. People are facing dire financial issues due to recession, salary-cuts, problems in adapting to new ways of working, and many such unlikely circumstances. Moreover, almost every business has shifted to online platforms to maintain its sales. Therefore, data analysis has become the need of the hour, and companies can achieve it with the help of web scraping. The right web scraping skills, and the knowledge of using web scraping proxies can definitely help businesses in survival in the post-covid world.
