As digital marketers, big data should be what we use to inform a lot of the decisions we make. Using intelligence to understand what works within your industry is absolutely crucial within content campaigns, but it blows my mind to know that so many businesses aren’t focusing on it.
One reason I often hear from businesses is that they don’t have the budget to invest in complex and expensive tools that can feed in reams of data to them. That said, you don’t always need to invest in expensive tools to gather valuable intelligence — this is where data scraping comes in.
Just so you understand, here’s a very brief overview of what data scraping is from Wikipedia:
“Data scraping is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program.”
Essentially, it involves crawling through a web page and gathering nuggets of information that you can use for your analysis. For example, you could search through a site like Search Engine Land and scrape the author names of each of the posts that have been published, and then you could correlate this to social share data to find who the top performing authors are on that website.
