People use proxies in business all the time to get valuable data and automate processes. In this article, we'll show you how to use proxies in business and what you should know before you start? We'll answer the common questions that we get asked. You're welcome to send us your question too.
Contents
- What is a Proxy Powered Solution?
- Proxies can be used for data scraping & analysis
- Do Businesses Perform Data Scraping In House or by Contracting Service Providers?
- What Prevents Enterprises from Performing Even More Data Scraping?
- How Much Do Enterprises Spend on Proxy Powered Solutions?
- What is the Public Perception of Using Proxies?
- How Do You Think Data Usage by Enterprises Will be Approached in the Future?
What is a Proxy Powered Solution?
Proxy power solutions are any data scraping, price monitoring, competitor analysis, or other tools and services based on the usage of proxies.
Why do Large Enterprises and Small Businesses Use it?
Proxy-powered solutions and proxy power solutions provide data you can turn into insights. This is valuable because enterprises use proxies for business. Intelligence, for example, to look at competitor price movements, product offerings, or search engine positions. Other use cases would be brand protection, searching for infringing content, localized marketing campaigns, and so on.
Providers have recently been pushing alternative data, such as looking at Reddit to make financial decisions and cyber security like email protection as possible uses.
Proxies can be used for data scraping & analysis
Let me show a good sample for you, proxies can be used for sentiment analysis, If you are in the business of running a large-scale customer support team, you know the importance of sentiment analysis. A customer's feedback can be very useful for a company's customer support team to understand, as it can identify existing pain points. Ultimately, this will allow a company to rise up its popularity and trust meter with every solved issue. In this article, we'll look at how residential proxies can be used for sentiment analysis.
As a marketer, you want to understand what your customers are feeling. With the help of sentiment analysis, you can tailor your marketing campaigns and determine which ones resonate best with your target audience. You can also find out whether your campaigns are hitting the mark by analyzing consumer sentiment in different geographical areas. This data will provide a wealth of competitive insights and product ideas. By applying this data to your business, you can improve your customer service and improve your marketing campaigns.
Sentiment analysis is extremely useful for any kind of market research. The use of online reviews and social media can help you discover a competitor's weak points and strong points. Additionally, you can learn about emerging trends and demands through following a brand's social media presence. Ultimately, this insight can help you stay one step ahead of the competition and keep your customers. This analysis is beneficial in many aspects of business, from analyzing competitor's products and services to determining what they're doing wrong.
Using the data from the social media platforms can help you to understand the thoughts and opinions of your audience. It allows you to take control of the situation and improve your business strategies. With these insights, you can develop and test different marketing strategies that can lead to more conversions. Using the data generated by sentiment analysis can help you gain a competitive edge and boost your online reputation. However, a good algorithm should be able to predict the sentiment of every post.
Do Businesses Perform Data Scraping In House or by Contracting Service Providers?
It depends on multiple factors, for example, how big the scope is and if the company has the resources to maintain its own infrastructure. The more data you collect, your incentive to build things in-house grows. This gives you more control and makes sense financially.
Proxies are basically a raw tool. They're the most resource-intensive option but also the cheapest straight on things. Like search engine APIs offload some of the work from you, but they can cost more. Data collection services are the easiest but costliest option.
What Prevents Enterprises from Performing Even More Data Scraping?
Data is a valuable asset for enterprises, especially those already involved with data scraping. So, what prevents them from performing even more data scraping?
If we're talking about proxies, it's labor and maintenance costs. Web scraping at scale by yourself is hard and requires a lot of effort to maintain. Proxy pools have downtime. They fluctuate if you're using residential IPs and sometimes get banned out. And this is only one part of web scraping.
Companies go a long way to hide their use of proxies. It's a taboo topic. We found out last year due to all the negative associations involved. So, sometimes it's hard to say if and to what extent they use proxy-powered solutions. Then there's the matter of using the data you've collected. Surprisingly, quite a few companies find that a challenge.
How Much Do Enterprises Spend on Proxy Powered Solutions?
Well, that really depends on enterprises striking individual deals with providers, which are hard to approximate contract length scope and other factors come into play.
What is the Public Perception of Using Proxies?
Proxies are still a no-no despite the best efforts by companies like Bright Data and Oxylabs. Too many bad associations last year, and we couldn't get some content published on well-known brands because of the shield away from associations with proxy networks. Maybe this will change at the cost of more intrusive user profiling.
Proxy providers are now starting to educate about ethical residential proxy acquisition models. They may move to a less sensitive type of proxies – altogether static residential proxies.
How Do You Think Data Usage by Enterprises Will be Approached in the Future?
Concerning regulation and laws, public data is generally good to go, as long as it avoids privately identifiable information. But we know lawyers, so don't take our word for it. Companies like Zeit already include a legal review as part of their data collection services. So I think there's nothing holding enterprises from doing the same.
