Techniques of web scraping you should know

It’s a process of extraction of data from various websites. It’s a variant of data scraping. The data extracted is then used for analysis. Web scraping involves fetching a web page and then extracting the data from it. Web scraping is used to understand the trend of the market, to understand your competitors and their pricing and then get ahead of them. Web scrapers typically take something from webpage and then use it for other purposes. The data may be parsed, reformatted or put in a spreadsheet etc.

Techniques of web scraping

Web scraping is the process of automatically collecting information from the World Wide Web. Following are some of the best web scraping techniques that can be used for collecting information: –

• Human copy and paste – Sometimes a better technology than any ever created. Usually websites don’t want their data to be scraped. For these sites, human touch can do the trick.
• Text pattern matching – It’s a very simple yet powerful approach. It’s based on UNIX grep command or regular expression matching facilities of programming languages.
• HTTP programming – HTTP requests can be posted to the web server to retrieve static and dynamic web pages.
• HTML parsing – websites generally have a large collection of pages generated dynamically. Same category data are usually encoded into similar pages by a common script or template. To parse HTML pages, languages like HTQL and XQuery can be used.
• Dom parsing – by embedding a full-fledged browser, programs can retrieve the dynamic content generated by client-side scripts.
• Semantic annotation recognizing – the pages being scraped may embrace semantic mark-ups and annotations. These can be used to locate specific data snippets.

Conclusion

Web data scraping in modern times has advanced the internet usage, marketing and management to a whole new dimension. The job which demanded days can be finished within few seconds. Extensively used in marketing and artificial intelligence analysis it’s importance cannot be ignored.

Finance And Marketing Research

Web scraping is an efficient method for organizations to reduce the workload upon people involved in the analysis and study of data. It involves analysis, storage, and the organization of data regarding specific topics which is found by scanning through digital media and them downloading this information into directories that are stored on computers or in databases.

It is very useful for understanding and collecting financial data as this information would otherwise involve large amounts of research to identify. Financial activities include a number of avenues which can include large amounts of data, and a wide range of activities. Often, the financial activities of a single organization may be handled by a large number of people or units simultaneously. Data scraping makes it easier for the coordination and management of these activities, as well as to maintain clear and ordered records of all data.

Financial activities are one of the central processes which are associated with all organizations and are hence it is vital to have proper management. In terms of research, it is easy for organizations to gather relevant information using scraping. It can be used to understand current trends, reactions of consumers, and analyse what actions and decisions should be taken.

Marketing Practices

Marketing is another key area where organizations can benefit from data scraping. A lot of marketing practices are very dependent on how consumers react to certain actions and behaviors. Moreover, marketing practices are many and varied and there may be different activities which are appropriate for different groups of people. Data scraping can be used to consolidate information about various trends and demands which are found in the market and to use it to analyse how an organization should proceed with its marketing activities. It is even more important in the initial stages of the development of an organization because marketing plays a key role during launch periods. At such times, there is a large amount of research and data analysis which goes into planning their activities. These activities would be highly strenuous and time consuming If done manually. It can also help in greatly reducing the amount of time that must be put into consolidating and coordinating information between various sources. This is a key issue for a number of large organizations having numerous functions, and for organizations that are dependent on current market activities.

Research is in itself a very strenuous process which involves a large amount of attention and precision which is better achieved by using digital methods. Moreover, there are many sources and a large number of further links that may have relations to the same type of information. In these cases, financial and marketing related research can get very complicated and hard to keep track of for individual people. Scraping can greatly improve the quality and quantity of the research as well as help in the simultaneous categorizing and storing of this information. Finally, it is safe to say there is too much information and data relating to marketing and finance which may be needed for an organization and this research can be greatly simplified by using data scraping and related technology.

Share Data scraping Jeopardy or bliss for compliance and risk management.pdf - 159 KB

Share Data scraping Jeopardy or bliss for compliance and risk management.pdf - 159 KB

Competitor price monitoring – Why Use It

The market is dynamically changing more than ever. Competition is growing more stiffer and stiffer with each passing day but so are the business opportunities. Previously companies used to depend solely on manual tools and techniques to track price surges and they used to guess the market trends with minimal information. This meant inaccurate decisions and probably a counter move that depreciates the business even further.

In order to stay up, companies should know what is happening in the market and what the competitors are doing. Product prices are the main thing that may attract customers or vice versa. Many a time reducing price is the only option if you need to gain more customers but there is always a problem, and in this case, it is the competition from other business that can probably spoil your new move. They may reduce the price even further and by the time you become aware of it, you might have lost all the business opportunity linked with the product.

Competitor Price Marketing

You might have understood the role of competitors in affecting your business. To make your business profitable, you need to be aware of the competitor’s move and also about the customer price offers. Previously, this method was slow and used to be quite complex but today, with growing digitalization, this has become faster and more accurate. Today, software is available to keep track of competitor pricing and also about the latest product trends in the market.

Why use it?

Today’s market has become multi-dimensional and more diverse than ever before. Growing economy has lead to more products and more customers. This means more business but with this growth, there is also an increase in the businesses and therefore more competition.

To stay ahead of the competition and to get more customers, you need to make sure that you attract more people and one way of doing it is by offering the cheapest prices. This is where a Competitor price Monitoring can help you.

With this software, you can keep track of the competitor prices for the products you have tagged. This won’t only help you to adjust your prices in a better way but will also help you to understand your competitor’s reaction to the price changes implemented by you. This is how big MNCs like Amazon function. They keep track of the prices offered in the market and immediately match their prices to attract more customers.

As per a study, 74% of business don’t track their competitor for prices and this costs them thousands if not lakhs. Just with a competitor, you can enhance the business and can gain a huge technical advantage over your customer. This is exclusive for online retailers and therefore should be used extensively.

You can avoid a lot of mistakes while assigning new prices. Most businesses use Excel to record data and then this is used for predicting new costs. This is a slow process and there are huge chances of mistakes. Using Competitor Price Monitoring software can not only help you make better decisions but also will enable you to save time and resources, thereby increasing your ROI.

Recent Trends In Web Data Mining

Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to extract the knowledge available in Web data. It includes Web documents, hyperlinks between documents, usage logs of web sites, etc. Nowadays its trend to extract data from different sources and organizes them for better usage

Firstly it was a ’process-centric view’, which defined Web mining as a sequence of tasks. Second was a ’data-centric view’, which defined Web mining in terms of the types of Web data in the mining process. The attention paid to Web mining is  in research of software industry, and Web-based organizations. It is the chance to capture them in a systematic manner, and identify directions for future research..

Web data mining consists of 3 following tasks

• Resource finding: It involves the task of retrieving intended web documents. It is the process by which the data either from online or offline text resources are available on web.
• Information selection and pre-processing: It involves the automatic selection and preprocessing of specific information from retrieved web resources. This process transforms the original retrieved data into information. The transformation could be renewal of stop words, stemming or it may be aimed for obtaining the desired representation such as finding phrases in training corpus.
• Generalization: It automatically discovers general patterns at individual web sites as well as across multiple sites. Data Mining techniques and machine learning are used in generalization 4. Analysis: It involves the validation and interpretation of the mined patterns. It plays an important role in pattern mining. A human plays an important role in information on knowledge discovery process on web.

Many businesses have been adopting the process of data mining to catch up with others. Business taking important information through data mining is widely used for decision making purposes. Here are some recent trends in Data Mining are:

• Multimedia Data Mining: It is one of the latest processes to catch up because of growing ability to capture useful data from different sources. Different sources include audio, text, hypertext, video, images etc. and data is transformed into a numerical representation in different format.
• Ubiquitous Data Mining: This involves mining of data from mobile devices to get information of individuals. These having several challenges like complexity, cost privacy, etc. these methods has a lot more opportunities to be enormous in these type of industries.
• Disturbed Data Mining: Though data mining has gained popularity as it involves mining huge amount of information stored in different company location. To extract this data highly sophisticated algorithms are used to provide proper insights and reports based on them.
• Satial And Geographic Data Mining: The new type of data mining includes extracting information from environment, astronomical, and geographical data as image is taken from space. These data mining can reveal various aspects such as distance and topology which is used in geographical information system and navigation too.

Time Series and Sequence Data Mining: These type of data mining studies about cyclical and seasonal trends. It is helpful in analyzing random events occur outside normal events. It is mainly used by retail companies to access customer buying and their behaviors.