It’s quite easy to make the assumption that almost every business has gone online, and with them, the competition has grown considerably. Diligently calculating how to make the right decisions when creating a business plan has never been so essential, no matter if it’s a small or a large business. And simply scraping-out how your competition manages their organizations and trying to sort of copy them is frankly not great enough. So what’s to be done then?
Data gathering using proxies for market research has recently emerged and started to grow with our society’s increasing digitalization. If you google “data for market research,” you will see that the worldwide interest has been the overall growing search for a little over five years now.
This new way of gathering data for market research will only continue to grow, therefore getting on top of this game should become the first priority for any business. Why? Because data gathering can be done in multiple ways, but the most prominent of ways is by using data extraction tools and/or proxies.
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Why proxies are used in web scraping
Although web scraping for market research is as legal as it can be, that doesn’t mean it’s always an easy one to carry out. Picking proxies for this process need to be done with a few considerations in mind. Some website owners are generally divergent when it comes to the scraping process, as some of these tools carry out unethical methods of scraping.
Such tools can have a detrimental effect on the websites when they download huge chunks of data on the go or send way too many queries. Such interactions can significantly decrease web speed for the website prospects and users.
Since web crawlers do not provide any traffic source or bring too many benefits to the website owners, most organizations rely on many security measures to block their actions. Some website owners even block or ban web scraping simply because they do not agree with open data access policies.
Picking the right proxies for market research can be difficult as the market is already booming with various proxy options and types.
Tips on choosing proxies for market research
It goes without saying that various proxy servers’ demerits and merits should be the key when choosing private proxies for web scraping. However, some proxies are more effective at web scraping than others, so the best proxies for market research should:
- Be legitimate
Datacenter proxies are currently the most common type of proxies you can find on the market. They are relatively affordable, easy to access, and incredibly popular with users that need access to geo-restricted content. What’s more, data center proxies do not come with a legitimate IP address, while residential types of proxies do.
- Not blacklisted or banned easily
Any effective webmaster monitoring web activity can say when data center proxies are scraping data, block or ban them. Luckily, residential proxies come up with a genuine Ip address. When applied in web scraping, their action will resemble an organic user and not be banned or blocked.
- Be rotated
Although a residential proxy is ideal for web scraping, it can raise suspicions when it’s continuously used on the same site. An excellent scraping tool necessitates a rotating pool of proxies to delay detection.
- Be reliable
Low quality and cheap proxies can be both slow and efficient. Because they’re generally overloaded with traffic, they tend to crash without notice.
This can hinder the scraping process. Use reliable and efficient proxies if you’re looking for more accurate data collection.
Modern days require modern solutions. And since modern-day market research is strongly associated with online data collection, organizations require fast, efficient, and accurate data mining processes. Web scraping remains the go-to online data harvesting process for gigantic amounts of data at the speed of light.
