It has numerous applications.
One is to automate and streamline the collection of a large volume of data without having to do it manually.
For instance, web scraping is a time-consuming, resource-intensive process, where files must be integrated manually or with other tools.
On the other hand, web data integration offers quick data delivery and requires few, if any, internal resources.
It’s largely automated, so information can be rapidly consumed without tying up internal resources.
It can also be used to monitor consumer sentiment and rate a company’s health.
By extracting data across a variety of blogs, industry sites, social media platforms, and news aggregator sites, it’s easy to gauge how customers feel about a particular business and which direction it’s trending.
This makes it ideal for performing equity research and can help investors make better decisions.
Besides that, web data integration is an excellent tool for price monitoring.
Keeping an eye on the pricing of key competitors within an industry allows SMEs to stay ahead of the curve and continually offer competitive pricing.
This helps create a more stable customer base, increase conversions, and boost revenue.
Examples of Industries Using Web Data Integration Retail companies use this technology in a few key ways, with optimizing the customer experience being one of the biggest.
SMEs in this industry can keep tabs on how their customers feel about their products and their overall brand by aggregating data from web sources.
This puts them in a position to fine-tune their offerings and address minor issues before they become major ones.
Monitoring competitor pricing helps business owners convert more leads and retain a larger percentage of their customer base.
And if they’re interested in expanding into new markets, they can do so more confidently by identifying white spaces and determining consumer demand.
Another example is the financial industry, where web data integration makes it possible to access a wide variety of alternative data such as financial statements, public records, and even satellite imagery to make better lending decisions.
For instance, lenders commonly use financial statements to determine a business’s trajectory and see how much of a risk they would be.
As for satellite imagery, lenders can analyze images of a parking lot to see how much foot traffic a business gets.
If the parking lot is usually filled up, it means it’s likely doing well – and vice versa.
Conclusion There’s certainly no lack of data available these days.
It’s being generated at a record pace and “will grow from 33 ZB in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025.
” However, the majority of business owners are failing to fully harness all of the information that’s available.
Understanding the web data integration process and utilizing the right tools can put an end to this problem and ensure SMEs properly put data to use.
It’s just a matter of knowing how it fits into a particular industry and making use of the key features.
About the Author Luke Fitzpatrick has been published in Forbes, Yahoo!.News and Influencive.
He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Sydney, lecturing in Cross-Cultural Management and the Pre-MBA Program.
In his spare time, he enjoys dabbling in code.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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