Web scraping is a method of getting data. What you do with this data depends on your needs and imagination. Needless to say, the scope of web scraping is huge. Here are some of the most popular among businesses:
1. For up-to-date price information – price scraping involves creating a price scraper to continuously monitor e-commerce sites. Being aware of the latest sales and price adjustments, sometimes in many places at the same time, is essential if you want to keep up with the times and stay ahead of the competition. Web scraping ensures that you always have a fresh feed of price data.
2. Data Aggregation from Multiple Sources − Data aggregation companies collect data from multiple sources at once and compare their results or choose the best source for the task. Data aggregation can be both an additional tool and an independent business model. It is especially common in the travel industry, where many airline ticket aggregator websites operate on its basis.
3. Keep an eye on market trends and competitor activity - By scanning the right websites, you can keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, both on and off the site. This includes not only product information, but content, PR materials, competitor news, and more. Web scraping can also give you insight into market trends - what's hot and where it's heading.
4.Generate leads for sales and recruiting – Another use case is searching for commercial leads in various public sources such as YellowPages, LinkedIn and job postings. Companies use the extracted data to create complex profiles of potential employees and customers: names, titles, salaries, locations, and more.
5.Protecting brands and monitoring their reputation - brand protection requires tracking product and brand mentions across the web; look for fakes and unauthorized use. It's a lot of work and you can't do it by hand. The same goes for reputation monitoring - you need to monitor social networks, review sites, news articles, discussion forums and other public spaces. Therefore, marketers often look to Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and other sources to keep abreast of what is happening with their brand online.