Gaining Business Insights With Web Data Integration

Companies traditionally used manual processes to copy and paste content from third-party sites into the company’s internal data—a process rife with the possibilities of errors. Today, web data extraction, standardizing, and integration tools have eliminated these rote tasks for smart businesses the world over.

There are many reasons for needing to acquire and integrate data stored on third-party or other internal websites. Popular uses include monitoring your competitors’ pricing or customers’ sentiment, fetching product catalogs and images, aggregating market or marketing data, collecting analytics, compiling a job board, and monitoring topics critical to your business such as social media mentions for your company or staff.

Web data also called alternative data, provides businesses with insights and content they are unable to collect on their own due to resource constraints—human, monetary, or technological.

Larger datasets result in better insights

Most businesses are already using internal data to gain insights into how their business is performing, how it stacks up against competitors, and what their customers think of the company, but the benefit of alternative data is the increased size of the dataset. Larger datasets are typically more meaningful because there is enough data to perform calculations. Having 2 of only 3 sales favor a Toyota is not as informative when making business decisions as having 2,000 out of 3,000 customers choose it.

Individual insights

Insurance companies make money when premiums are higher than pay-outs. In order to ensure this, the company must develop an understanding of which of their customers are high-risk and which are low. Aggregating data from social media accounts, an insurance company could look for indicators their insured are partaking in high-risk activities, such as street racing, skydiving, or skiing the black diamonds and adjust premiums accordingly or drop them as a client.

Some insurance companies, such as Progressive and Allstate, have offered their customers a device that is plugged into their cars’ computers and collects data on driving habits. Though not from a third-party website, this is alternative data the company can use to assess risk factors and set premiums.

Keeping a close eye on customer sentiment is important to a wide variety of business types, but with hundreds—maybe thousands—of review websites, it is difficult to monitor the entire web for what customers may be saying about a business. Using web data extraction review sites are identified and constantly monitored for new content about the company or about the company’s competitors.

Retail insights

Retail businesses have been using alternative data for decades, but like other verticals, they are benefitting in big ways from automation. Stores can now collect data about their competitors’ sales with nearly the same level of insight as with their own. They can also build out larger product catalogs more quickly by extracting data from manufacturers’ sites. Conversely, manufacturers of those products can extract data from their distributors’ and resellers’ websites to ensure they are compliant with distribution guidelines surrounding MAP compliance.

Real-time and predictive analytics

Real-time analytics refers to data analyzed the moment it becomes available. It is often used by financial institutions to make decisions about issuing credit. Email-automation applications and CRMs are also good examples—both provide instant data reports as customers interact with messages sent from the systems.

When a business analyzes existing data in search of patterns to forecast future outcomes or trends, this is known as predictive analysis. These types of predictions are more accurate with more data and can be used to identify psycho-demographic insights into traits on psychological attributes such as personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Unlike simple demographics such as age and income, psychological traits are much more difficult to discern and require large data sets.

Summing up

The ability to tap into big data from websites across the internet using web data extraction, standardization and integration tools and services enables companies of every size to benefit from insights only large datasets can provide. The automation of what was once a cut-and-paste chore and not only reduced the time needed but also ensured quality and expanded possibilities.