Market Research Data Collection With Proxies

The business world is more competitive than ever. The internet makes it easy for customers to find all sorts of companies just like yours. If you want to succeed, you need to figure out how to stand out.

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Luckily, the internet isn’t all bad for business. You can use the internet for market research data collection to learn about your competition and how to improve your company. With the right tools, you can harness the power of the web to make your business better than ever.

Web scrapers are the tools you need. Keep reading to learn why data collection for market research is so important, how web scrapers and proxies can help, and how to get started today.

Why Businesses Need Market Research Data Collection

There are three major reasons companies like yours undertake market research data collection. Here’s how you can benefit from taking the time to study your market and your customers.

1. Spot opportunities

The right market research helps you find ways to improve your offerings. You can study things like what your customers like, where else they shop, and what they respond to.

For example, you can study your audience’s shopping habits to learn which businesses are a good idea for potential partnerships. That kind of partnership can drive new business to every company involved as long as there’s actually a data-based connection.

You can also study the market to spot gaps you can fill. Market research can help you collect information about price ranges, quality levels, and even geographic locations. You can use that knowledge to decide whether to release new products and choose where to open new stores. Without doing your homework, you’re just firing a shot in the dark with those decisions.

2. Avoid mistakes

Of course, just like research can help you make good choices to improve your business, it can also help you avoid bad decisions. Thorough market research can help you spot pricing decisions and product features that won’t appeal to your audience. You can study your competitors’ choices and learn from their marketing and product development mistakes.

You can also use market research tools to learn about what your customers don’t like. You can study product reviews and spot trends in negative reviews or look at social media for common complaints. That’s a simple way to get the kind of data-rich feedback you need to avoid mistakes without having to hire a focus group.

3. Refine your approach

You can use market research to refine your marketing approach, too. For example, you can study your audience demographics and learn about the people who are most engaged with your company. That information can help you create more relevant advertising campaigns and get better responses.

You can even use market research to learn exactly where and how to advertise. The right research tool can help you learn about the phrasing that appeals to your audience and the advertising methods they actually see. Collecting enough information will help you stay ahead of your competitors and keep your advertising effective and interesting.

How Web Scraping Provides Sources of Data Collection for Market Research

Market research is much cheaper than guessing what customers want and guessing wrong. Of course, this type of analysis works best if you have a large dataset to work with. If you don’t collect enough information, then you may as well still be guessing.

That’s why web scraping is invaluable for modern market researchers. Web scraping lets you gather all the information you could ever want quickly and easily. Here’s how web scraping can help you with market research data collection:

Collect reviews

Customer reviews are full of rich data. If someone bothers to leave a review, they obviously care about the product one way or another. You can scrape your own website or the pages of competitors to learn about customer preferences.

For instance, you can study one- and two-star reviews to learn about the most common customer complaints. You can use that data to improve your product and ensure that you’re providing the best service possible.

Investigate pricing

You don’t need to compete entirely based on your offerings. You can also position your company to be more competitive with strategic pricing. That requires you to understand the pricing plans in your field.

With the right data collection methods market research can help you charge appropriately for your offerings. You can discover common, minimum-advertised sale prices, sales dates, and the price points for different tiers of goods and services. From there, you can make informed decisions about how much to charge for everything you sell.

Study product features

If you want to release a new product or service, market research data collection is vital. Before you begin product development, you can research similar offerings and learn about their features.

In combination with reviews and pricing data, you can create a new offering that customers will appreciate and charge the right amount for it.

Why You Need Proxies for Data Collection for Market Research

Web scrapers are useful for you, but they aren’t the preferred type of traffic for most websites. After all, websites want visitors, but they’re designed for those visitors to be real people. Bots like web scrapers rack up many website page visits in a short amount of time, which isn’t what most sites are designed to handle.

That’s why many websites pay attention to the IP address of every visitor. An IP address is basically a person ID for your computer. If a website notices that a certain IP address is acting too robotic, then it might block that address entirely.

That’s a problem if you’re doing market research data collection. Your web scraper could get blocked before it finishes its job, leaving you without enough information.

Proxies can help. A proxy is like a shield for your IP address. When you use a proxy, the websites you visit see the proxy’s IP address, not yours. If you have a selection of proxies, you can keep your business’s IP address hidden and switch to a new proxy if one gets blocked. That way, you can guarantee that you always get the data you need.

How to Choose the Right Proxy For Your Research

There are plenty of sources of data collection for market research, so you have a decision to make. Choosing the right proxy provider will impact the reliability of your web scrapes and your internet security. Here’s how to choose well.

Know the proxy type you need

When you’re choosing a proxy, you’ll need to decide between several different types. Proxies can look like they’re hosted in two different places: data centers or private residences.

That matters because websites can read IP addresses and proxies to learn where they’re from.

Data Center Proxies can be a real advantage to your scraping project. These proxies are used primarily for large scraping projects. Their speed over residential proxies gives your team an advantage! What could take weeks for you, for data center proxies only take moments.

Static residential proxies are stable. You set up a single proxy and you remain behind it until you choose to switch. Meanwhile, rotating proxies are a collection of several different IP addresses that automatically turn on and off. You’re always behind one of them, but they alternate so the sites you visit don’t spot a single IP address and connect it to a pattern of behavior.

Rotating proxies are even less likely to be blocked than static ones, but both types of residential proxies are more reliable than data center alternatives. If you’re doing small data scrapes, a static proxy is more than likely enough, but it may be worth investing in rotating residential proxies if you want to perform large-scale web scraping.

Choose an ethical provider

Outside of choosing the type of proxy you want, you also need to choose the right provider. Unscrupulous providers may not be honest about their proxy sources. They may be using personal IP addresses from users without getting their informed consent, for example, which is illegal.

Even if they aren’t stealing IPs for proxies, they may simply not use enough security. Either way, your company can suffer.

When you’re choosing partner companies for data collection for market research, ethics are important. Unethical proxies are more likely to fail, get banned, or leave your business open to hackers. Even outside of moral considerations, unethical proxy providers are a bad choice for your company’s safety.

In Summary

It’s true that the modern business world is incredibly competitive. Luckily, the internet offers benefits for companies that are willing to put in the work. You can make the most of the internet and improve your business just by doing your research.

Data collection for market research can be easy when you use web scraping software with secure, ethical proxies. It’s all about performing the right market research data collection so you can make the best decisions possible.