Powerful Tools for Market Research

The success of modern businesses depends on extensive market research. As the internet creates extremely efficient ways of data storage, transmission, and communication, the web is overloaded with information that can be transformed into valuable knowledge with efficient extraction and filtering.

Extensive Market Research

Extensive research plays into the old saying – Knowledge is power. Researching your market provides essential aid in the development of your business, analysing your competitors and potential clients. Collected information helps you understand how your company is perceived in the digital business environment. 

Analyzing clients in your niche helps us discover new players in the market, tendencies of current customers, and ways to reach new audiences. In every step of the way, collected data carry valuable insight on all related subjects.

Even if your goal is analysing successful competitors, you can still observe how clients interact with superior businesses in the market, the supply and demand of products in your niche, etc.

Pros & Cons of Extensive Market Research

In essence, extensive market research is a blanket term that covers obtainable knowledge about the market and its components. For most of business history, all steps of information extraction and analysis were performed manually by humans. 

This approach has its advantages: our brains are powerful multitasking machines capable of transforming obtained data into knowledge in no time. However, when we start dealing with inhuman amounts of information on the web, our biological capabilities provide insufficient speed, efficiency, and storage.

The biggest weakness of our biological tools is the ability to store data, which is coincidentally the biggest strength of tools provided by information technologies. When combined with other tech inventions, we can automate large portions of data aggregation.

Reasons to Use Search Engine Proxies 

In this article, we will discuss powerful tools for market research. We can utilize pre-built tools that target search engines and extract information at a far greater pace. 

For example, because Google is the world’s most popular and effective search engine, companies often use a Google scraper or another web scraping tool to automate large data extraction tasks. Check out Smartproxy – a business-oriented proxy provider that provides informative articles on the functionality of its services. 

For now, let’s take a deeper look at the capabilities of a google scraper and other necessities for researching your market.

Protecting Search Engine Against Scrapers

As we already established, search engine scrapers are extremely powerful tools that assist us in collecting information for market research. Ironically, search engines aggregate their data by scraping the entire web themselves, but when it comes to users scraping their engine, problems start to arise.

Automated data extraction sends more data requests to web servers that run search engines than a real user would. Companies behind them can recognize automated bots and ban their IP address.

It is a threat to a company conducting market research. Attempts to accelerate information collection end up hurting a business when IP addresses get recognized and blacklisted. Still, despite all these threats, companies continue scraping information from search engines. How do they get away with it?

One way to address the problem is to scale down the efficiency of scraping bots. However, the process is tricky because search engines differ in their sensitivity towards data requests. Thankfully there is a solution that helps us preserve optimal efficiency – protect data extraction with proxy servers. 

Why Do Businesses Need Proxy Servers?

• Partnerships with proxy server providers help businesses preserve anonymity on the web while performing sensitive tasks. The information for market research can be obtained from many sources, but search engines and competitor websites have more risks and protective barriers that punish network identity exposure.

• That is why it is crucial to protect your market research tools with proxy servers. Once your connections go through an intermediary IP, the main address will not get exposed. Business-oriented proxy providers supply companies with thousands of different addresses so they can cycle between them and keep data extraction tools as efficient as possible.

• Residential proxies are the go-to type for intensive information aggregation tasks. Because IPs come from real devices supplied by internet service providers, recipients are far more likely to treat them as authentic users. You can experiment with cheaper options, but residential proxies will give you the most optimal results.

• Scraping bots and complimentary proxy servers are the primary tools that do the heavy lifting in market research. Sadly, not every step of the way can be automated. Extracted public data comes in as HTML code.

• It needs to be parsed into a readable and analyzable format. Targeted websites often differ in their structure and can apply various changes daily. These inconsistencies make parsing the most resource-draining part of data extraction because it is nearly impossible to automate. 

• However, writing unique parsers for each website is not a very difficult task, that is often performed by employed junior developers. This shows that companies that want to thrive in a digital business environment have to employ tech-savvy personnel. 

• While smaller companies, which have lesser dependence on information technologies, can make do by requalifying a part of their stuff to work with data, large corporations need data science departments to get the most out of the acquired information.