Throughout 2022, companies globally have been preparing for a potential recession. Major enterprises like Amazon, Apple, Lyft and more have recently announced their plans to downsize operations, implement hiring freezes and reduce their budgets in various departments.
Despite these concerns and preventative efforts, a recent survey of 500 IT, technology and data analytics professionals across the retail, banking and travel sectors in the U.S, U.K., and France revealed a significant number of companies are still expanding their web data usage and collection.
What are the business needs that website data is solving? And what do these trends indicate about the future of operations?
First, a quick definition
Any information that is publicly available on the internet (not behind a sign-in or log-in) can be collected, analyzed and utilized by companies. Some of the most common uses of web data include conducting market research to identify gaps or opportunities and comparing pricing and products to gain a competitive edge over other market players.
The insights gathered from web data have become invaluable for addressing the most time-sensitive and business-sensitive challenges and in ensuring that a company’s offerings are hyper-relevant to their target customers. It can make all the difference between winning and winning more. In today’s recession-guided reality, this is not only valuable but critical to any business aiming to hit revenue goals.
Gathering web data – current market trends
According to the survey, 93% of businesses find web data to be either “very important” or “crucial” to supporting their operations and making successful decisions, and 87% of individuals reported that the need for web data within their organizations has grown since 2021. Interestingly, despite financial cuts and other preparations for the impending global recession, 90% of respondents also stated that their web data budgets increased within the past year.
These results indicate that varying business sectors have increased their reliance on web data, and companies are seeing it as crucial to the success of their operations.
Product research and development (47%), competitor monitoring (45%), and testing/training of operational systems (43%) were named as the primary uses of these insights. The most common online sources included social media (58%), search engines (56%) and competitor websites (47%).
“It’s not surprising to see that web data has become the most used source of data in businesses today across the board,” said Amir Yazdi, marketing analyst at McDonald’s Canada, in a statement. “As the survey indicates, the uses of web data range from competitive strategy building to pricing strategy, from measuring public sentiments to training operational systems. All this is done to ensure that customers or consumers get the most relevant services, offers or products. After all, that is the goal of every business and organization.”
How are companies gaining access to this web-based real-time information?
To best gauge consumer sentiment, determine effective pricing, offer the right products and more, most respondents (97%) emphasized the importance of accessing multiple sources or web data sets.
As a result, the majority of organizations (90%) are turning to web scraping technologies and applications that collect insights at scale, automatically and from a range of sources. The survey was relatively evenly divided between the number of companies who are conducting this process internally (48%) or utilizing pre-made, off-the-shelf, single-subject data sets (32%) from individual or various sources.
Notably, over half (56%) of respondents reported that their organizations are unable to manage data demands internally and are instead considering an acquisition or an external partner to support their web data efforts (55%) – an increase of 25% since 2020.
Web data: a rewardable investment
Overall, the survey shows that organizations have dedicated more resources to their web data efforts over the past year. But how can they make sure these efforts are sufficient, particularly as a potential recession looms and market inconsistency continues?
The smartest companies will combine the power of both pre-made and tailored data sets to ensure efficiency and cost effectiveness as they address essential business decisions and work to drive success.
Omri Orgad is the chief customer officer at Bright Data.
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