Getting That Valuable Data From The Online World
Collecting and organizing customer data, from how they use your website to the details that they’re willing to share freely with you, can play a huge role in the success of websites and businesses. Data can be used to improve artificial intelligence such as with chatbots or to help you better strategize your marketing, sales, and support. But how do you get the data that you’re looking for? Here are a few ways to get it from your site.
Look to the analytics
For some kinds of data, you don’t need to look much further than the tools that might already be available to you. Website analytics can tell you a whole lot about how people are using your site, where they’re finding it, where they are, and what pages keep them clicking, and which keep them bouncing. Learn to get more out of your analytics so you can make the best use of them. This also applies to social media engagement and marketing campaigns, too, helping you understand a lot more about how your customers interface with your business.
Ask them for it
There are plenty of ways that you use your points of interaction to simply ask for more data from your customers. Surveys can be an excellent way to do it. You can ask them to provide information when they opt-in for newsletters or other subscriptions. You can keep a hold of transaction history and customer orders on your site, as well. You do want to be wary about how much information you’re going to ask for right out the gate, but these different contact points can allow you to collect plenty of rich data, bit by bit.
Turning the site itself into data
Websites provide data on more than just the customers. If you’re looking beyond your own website, then there might be other sites that you want to get some insight on, for instance. To that end, following a guide to web scraping with javascript can allow you to turn another website purely into data that can be downloaded and replicated. This is often used by search engines, price comparison sites, and market research companies to pull data from all manner of online sources outside of their own control.
Consider buying the data you want
Now, this method isn’t always the most reliable, since you never do know the value or relevance of the data you’re getting until you get your hands on it. However, there are data collection agencies that sell customer data, just like lead generation companies sell leads. You can buy this data directly from data brokers who have been capturing that data for marketing, fraud detection, and credit scoring purposes. Many of the datasets on offer are categorized to help businesses find those most relevant to their own audiences and purposes, too.
If you’re grabbing data from a website, it’s always a good idea to have a purpose in mind for it. Otherwise, making anything useful from the glut of information at your disposal can be hard.
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