Effective Data Scraping Strategies and Resources for Digital Marketers
Data scraping is not a new practice. It pre-dates the internet and existed even before data mining was much of a concept. From a marketing perspective, it began long before manual copying and pasting. Relevant company information got copied with pen and paper. These days, bots do the work for us and have a superior success rate. The concept of data scraping has been on shaky ground regarding legal concerns. Thanks to the settlement in the early 2000s with eBay vs. Bidder’s Edge , companies can still take accessible website information. Obviously, this can’t extend to hacking to steal private information. Data scraping, web crawling , data extracting , screen scraping, Data Mining , Web Crawling or similarly-named activities, are still legal and easy to do. Here are just a few strategies to consider: Competitive Monitoring Content Aggregation Sentiment Analysis Machine Learning 1. Competitive Monitoring Competitive monitoring, or competitor analysis, is central to data scraping. Y