Media, Advertising, or Marketing: How to Use Web Scraping to Your Advantage

8 min readApr 5, 2021

Keeping up with the new trends and the latest information is a must when it comes to media, advertising, or marketing.

Any company, whether talking about agencies or corporations, wants to be on top of the game. And that’s pretty obvious because usually, this type of businesses anticipate what’s going to happen before it happens, predicting what’s going to be famous before it pops.

But how can you always be the star of the show and not miss any topic, news, or trend? One of the most innovative ways is web scraping.

We all know that data is key and the most valuable asset in this world ruled by digital influence. So, whether it’s online, offline, news, or trends, web scraping can help any aspect of the media, advertising, or marketing industries. But before any recommendations and presentation of the benefits, let’s describe a few terms.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping, also known as web data extraction or web harvesting, is an automatic process of collecting structured web data run by bots. But some time ago, web scraping was only an idea and your only option was a tedious process.

Imagine that web scrapers or crawlers weren’t around. Finding the site or information you needed was a time-consuming task. As a result, instead of sifting through the Internet, again and again, people began to save or copy and paste the data they needed. At that time, programmers began developing the first web scrapers in order to reduce the amount of time it took to retrieve results.

Now, whether you use visual software, a browser extension, a handy API, or just build your own scraper, you get closer to the necessary data in a specific format (JSON, CVS, Excel, etc.). This way, you stop consuming time that can be invested in analyzing this data, filtering information, and using it either to make strategic decisions for a project or to improve your products or business.

Now that we know what web scraping is all about let me give you some reasons why it is worth benefiting from the power of web scraping. Here are some advantages.

Why use web scraping: top 3 advantages

Automation

The most significant advantage of web scraping is the creation of tools that have made retrieving data from various websites as simple as a few clicks.

Before this method, data could always be collected, but it was a laborious and time-consuming operation. Imagine trying to copy and paste text, pictures, or other data regularly 🙄. Luckily, web scraping tools nowadays make data extraction in any volume both simple and quick in a way that makes you almost not move a finger.

Cost-Effective

Another equally important advantage is related to costs. As mentioned before, data extraction by hand is a time-consuming procedure that necessitates a large workforce and significant resources. And that means more costs.

Nonetheless, web scraping, like many other modern techniques, has offered a solution to this problem. The various services available on the market can do this while being cost-effective and budget-friendly. But that all depends on the amount of data you need, the functionality of the extraction software you’ll need, and your goals.

Data Accuracy

Last but not least, web scrapings bring lots of benefits regarding accuracy.

When doing a task manually, human error is a normal phenomenon, and this may lead to more severe issues later. As a consequence, effective data extraction is crucial for any sort of information. When it comes to page scraping, though, this is not possible. Or, at the very least, it occurs in very small amounts that can be quickly corrected.

Preparing to move on to the icing on the cake of the article, let me give you one last tip. If you thought these were the only benefits of web scraping, well, that’s not the case. Discover the full of both advantages and disadvantages of using web scraping.

Ways media people, advertisers, and marketers can use web scraping

As mentioned so many times before, web scraping is a technique that includes many positive and beneficial aspects for those who use it. Here are some ways people or companies active in media, advertising, and marketing can benefit from what web cramping has the best to offer.

Social Media

Social Media can be considered a treasure trove of opportunities. When we associate web scraping with it, we can say that the real exploration of social media begins with data extraction. And here we are talking about information that refers to trends, so you can find posts you can publish before the next big thing happens, the newest and hottest topics of discussion of different target groups, and much more. Let’s discover the possibilities of social media web scraping.

Ad monitoring

Ads are all over the place, and many companies are taking advantage of them, including your competition. So, you may use web scraping to keep track of the most common ads they create. From here on, you can identify new trends, new company campaigns, budgets, insights about their target groups, and much more. Do not forget, take advantage of your findings to boost your own advertising and achieve a strategic advantage.

Customers viewpoint

We all know that social media is a place of opinions. And we are not referring here only to posts or tweets that are posted daily but also to the reviews or feedback on various products or business pages. With the help of web scraping, you can get valuable information by collecting all that.

The data analysis (e.g., language, context, and emotions) will help you develop a greater understanding of overall customer satisfaction, loyalty, and interaction intent by tracking customer feelings or points of view. All this can provide information about current or future marketing strategies.

Market segmentation

Market segmentation is the process of dividing a target market into smaller, more defined categories. It segments customers and audiences into groups that share similar characteristics such as demographics, interests, needs, or location.

Web scraping can be one important technique to help you achieve the right segmentation and targeting. By obtaining and reviewing social media datasets with important information like interests and needs, you can determine to whom and when to sell your goods or services. Identifying more targeted markets and groups will guarantee you the best out of your marketing activities.

Brand monitoring

Monitoring a brand (whether it’s yours or the competitors’’) requires not only seeing what consumers have to say but also hearing the voice of the entire public and industry experts. When it comes to this process, monitoring does not involve just products or service reviews but also your customer behavior, engagement, sales process, and every other touchpoint where consumers interact with your brand.

Only by following and analyzing these aspects, you can make your brand an essential and unparalleled player in the industry in which it carries its activity.

Trends

Identifying consumer behavior and tracking trends is important for changing any strategic marketing activities and keeping a company or brand aligned with the industry’s future changes. So, trends scraping can help you find not only various opportunities but also be aware of things before they happen.

SEO, Publishing, and Monitoring

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When it comes to having content created, used, read, and posted, SEO is crucial. Web scraping can help you search for the necessary keywords other brands use by extracting posts, images, articles, and so on.

So, you can certainly map related keywords over time and improve your exposure through page scraping of news, articles, etc. Alternatively, keep an eye on what your competitors are doing and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.

Automation of article collection

The role of web scraping in this process is to save you all the time spent gathering all the necessary resources when it comes to articles. And here we can talk about popular articles from the industry that interest you or maybe the articles published by your brand’s competition.

Think that by setting a correct process, a scraper does all the tiring work, and you will get the necessary data in no time, in a specific format, depending on the tool you use.

Article monitoring

When publishing articles, it is well known that you have to come with a strategy. You have to write, edit, publish and repeat the same routine, at a constant frequency. But when you do so, you always need to make sure that you do the right thing and publish great and factual content taking into account well-established strategies and rules.

In this case, web scraping helps you to monitor, for example, the success of your blog posts all over the Internet using metrics like feedback and likes, allowing you a strategic perspective of what you might be focusing on and how the content can do.

Fresh content ideas

Even if your content preparation plan is already established, this does not mean that as a marketer, advertiser, or media person, you are not constantly researching.

In this case, web scraping is like an ace up your sleeve. It will always help you find fresh resources. Moreover, it will help you see how others structure their pieces of content, what titles, how many images, or what other tactics they use to have top performant materials.

Could web scraping support you in your advertising, marketing, and media projects?

I hope you certainly agree with me that the conclusion of these lines: YES, web scraping can help any media, marketing, and advertising person, any company, department, or agency in these complex industries with their projects and strategies.

Why? Because ultimately, they all share one common need — to gain insight into what will attract attention and bring the best results. But to get here, you need a large volume of data that can be obtained with the help of web scraping in no time. After analyzing them, the results can only be positive.

Oh, let’s not forget. If you have ever thought about starting to scrape the web for any project of yours, choose to use an API. WebScrapingAPI, for example, is a great choice. But if you do not have technical knowledge, you can pick another kind of tool.

If you don’t want to be left out with the information, I recommend continuing your research on web scraping by reading some of the sources below.

Enjoy!