• Order eScraper software for $149 only
    Price will increase shortly! Get one (1) lifetime license to scrape one site with Single site plan
  • Home » Useful Articles » Case study: tracking crowd-marketing activities using web scraping

    Case study: tracking crowd-marketing activities using web scraping

    (2)
    By eMagicOne
    article-img-sect-1

    Store owners most often use eScraper to extract data for their eCommerce needs like building up catalogs or tracking prices. This time we want to share an interesting case of using automatic data extraction in marketing.

    article-sect-1

    Our client uses crowd-marketing to get backlinks and increase their brand awareness. Their crowd-marketing campaign includes the following activities:

    • Finding industry-related review websites, forums, blogs, Q&A services, and social media platforms.
    • Writing answers to the users’ questions and posting comments on articles, videos, and other content.
    • Promoting their own comments by upvoting them or commenting on them or asking their customers to do so.

    The challenge: how to track crowd-marketing activities

    When the marketers posted their comments, it was hard to track how many of them were upvoted by other users, stayed visible (not collapsed or hidden), and were not deleted. Also, the marketers wanted to know how promoting their comments through likes, upvotes and replies would help them push those comments to the top of the discussion.

    As the number of comments published every week was very high, it was hard to track them manually. That’s why it was decided to try data scraping technology to track and monitor crowd-marketing activities.

    Utilizing web scraping to parse crowd-marketing comments on any website or service

    Our client had a list of URLs where their marketing department posted their comments. Also, they had a list of user profiles under which they posted their comments. The eScraper service parsed the given URLs and searched for the specified user comments. One file/list per one marketing platform.

    Here’s an example of the file with the results of such scrape for one marketing platform:

    eScraper Crowd Marketing Scraped File

    Crowd marketing comments and positions scraped to a file

    Based on the collected data, eScraper engineers made a report to help the store owner and CMO analyze the results. The report shows the number of URLs for each comment position. For example, 127 URLs have remained in the first position, 71 URLs in the 2nd position, and 24 URLs – in the 3d position. There were also a number of comments not available anymore.

    If we want to see the list of URLs where the comments remained, say, in the 1st position, we switch back to the previous sheet and filter positions by “1”:

    eScraper Crowd Marketing Web Scraping Report

    Report based on scraped crowd-marketing data

    Repeated scraping for performance tracking

    The client wanted to check how the comments positions have changed overtime. In a month, the eScraper engineers scraped the positions for the comments from the initial file. The result was presented in the following report.

    eScraper Crowd Marketing Repeaded Scrape

    Repeaded Scrape for Crowd Marketing

    From the report, it could be seen that 13.21% of comments lost their positions and 33.57% comments improved their positions. Based on this report, the client could work on the comments with dicreased positions. They deleted the existing comment and added a new ome so that it appeared at the top.

    The result. How will web scraping for crowd-marketing be used further

    Thanks to the web scraping technology, our client was able to get the number of existing comments and their positions in a matter of one hour. Now that they have the scraping tool at hand, they will be able to use it further to solve even more tasks:

    • Tracking the work of several crowd-marketers.
    • Promoting their own comments and tracking how their positions change over time.
    • Tracking comments on other platforms where like: forums, Reddit, Quora, eCommerce communities, and others.

    Hope this article was helpful and brought you new ideas on how to make data-driven decisions in crowd-marketing. If you have any questions on how web scraping can assist in your particular case, don’t hesitate to write us in the comments below. We’ll explore your tasks and offer your possible solutions.

    Ready to try automated data extraction for your crowd-marketing activities tracking? Order a free scrape and receive a test file or download eScraper software and set up the scraper on your own!

    Was this article helpful?

    Order free scrape to track crowd-marketing activities

    Try eScraper
    Related articles

    3 min

    Pet products data scraping: cases and how-tos

    If you are engaged in the pet products industry, data scraping can be a great helper in a number of situations. The most common are getting product listings from your supplier, analyzing competitor product and pricing strategy, monitoring customer reviews, and others.

    3 min

    5 Typical Challenges DropShippers Face And How to Solve Them with Website Scraping

    When you are starting a dropshipping business and contacting possible suppliers you imply that they will provide you information about their products: images, descriptions, prices. Ideally, the manufacturer would give you a catalog with complete product descriptions, large and thumbnail images, product specifications.

    3 min

    Jewelry websites scraping: use cases

    Do you want to get into jewelry drop shipping or already run your web store? Then you must have faced challenges with obtaining product data. Indeed, creating product listings for a jewelry store, updating product descriptions, prices, and stock requires relevant and timely data. In this article, we’ll describe how jewelry website scraping helps to get these types of data really fast and perfectly structured.

    Comments Join the discussion...
    Noah

    Noah — 01.18.2023 at 18:46 01.18.2023 at 18:46

    Thanks for your article. Never thought about this combination of marketing and web scraping.

    Reply
    eScraper

    eScraper — 01.19.2023 at 09:47 01.19.2023 at 09:47

    Indeed, scraping can be helpful in many cases. If you have thoughts about using data scraping for your specific task, write to us and we’ll discuss your matter.

    Reply
    img-form