The use of data in your business is increasingly becoming more of a necessity rather than something that’s nice to do.
To understand your market, get insights on the competition, and generate leads, you need data. Businesses – both big and small – can now leverage data to make marketing and financial decisions that impact their bottom line.
More and more firms are using web scraping tools to collect data from the internet. Web scraping proxies provide you with an efficient data extraction process that provides you with relevant data to support and enhance your business.
Residential ip proxy is an IP of a private residence that allows you to send your request through a residential network. Since they use genuine IP addresses that belong to actual physical devices, they appear as average users to servers and are thus hard to detect.
Generally, residential proxies are considered the best proxies given that they help you avoid geo-restrictions among other benefits. However, they tend to be more expensive since they are not easy to obtain. Because they use personal networks to perform the scraping, they also tend to raise legal or consent concerns.
How businesses can use web scraping to their advantage
Wondering whether your business needs web scraping? To maintain your competitive edge amidst new technologies, new market entrants, increasing competition and digitization, you need access to data. Lots of data. Better data than your competition.
Web scraping can thus benefit your business in several ways;
1. Generating sales leads
You can set specific search criteria to enable you to get relevant data on customer information such as email addresses and phone numbers from social media profiles. This makes it easier to analyze the data collected and get relevant leads to potential customers. You can also build an effective email marketing campaign using the emails collected.
2. Improving SEO
You can help your site improve its search rankings and thus increase your web traffic. Using web scraping, you can find out about keyword optimization and what high-ranking pages to target your keywords.
3. Market research
You can collect data on the market and your competition, gain customer insights, and get informed on the performance of your products and services. This keeps you updated and helps you come up with marketing and pricing strategies that keep you well ahead of the curve.
4. Brand monitoring
Web scraping can also help to keep you informed on the number of mentions your company gets and customer sentiments regarding your company. You can thus proactively arrest any negative sentiments and protect your brand image.
How to use proxies for web scraping
Proxies act as intermediaries between users and the web. They mask your IP address while displaying to the targeted websites the server’s IP address. As such, any website accessed through a proxy gets to see the proxy server’s IP address only.
Types of proxies
1. Residential proxies
These are pools of genuine residential IP addresses that connect to genuine Internet service providers. These proxies boast the highest product quality because they are undetectable and look exactly like real devices – mobiles or desktops.
They are also safe from both bulk bans and blocks since they do not share any subnetworks.
Thus, when doing large-scale social media marketing, residential proxies offer you the best option since you can manage an unlimited number of accounts. You can also geo-target multiple global locations and gain access to genuine IP addresses from any location.
2. Data center proxies
These are artificial and non-physical IP addresses that are created at data centers. Each server can host hundreds of proxies, however, they all share the server’s IP subnetwork. Therefore, each group of data center proxies looks very alike and is at risk of a ban or cloaking.
Datacenter proxies have incredible speeds since most of them have an enviable internet connection.
3. Mobile Proxies
These are proxies with IP addresses obtained from mobile ISPs. They route your web requests via mobile devices linked to cellular networks. Because of this, websites see these requests coming from mobile devices.
4. Private Proxies
These proxies can only be used by a single user at a time. Their use is also restricted and you need authentication to access them.
5. Dedicated proxies
These proxies cannot be shared. They can only be used by a single user at a time.
6. Shared proxies
Unlike dedicated proxies, these can be used by several clients concurrently. They are also cheap.
7. Public Proxies
Anyone can gain access to these anytime. Usually free, they are regarded as the most unstable and are mostly used by hackers.
Final Thoughts
No modern business that embraces technology can exploit the market fully without the use of data intelligence. Web scraping helps you use relevant and well-structured data for market analysis which helps keep your business ahead.
