Bright Data, a leading provider of proxy and data collection infrastructure, recently acquired Market Beyond, an Israeli ecommerce analytics startup. This allows Bright Data to launch a new data analytics division called Bright Insights, which promises to give customers valuable insights from public data using machine learning.
Contents
- About Bright Data
- Overview of Market Beyond
- Introducing Bright Insights
- The High-Growth Ecommerce Analytics Market
- Competing Against Analytics Heavyweights
- Applications Beyond Retail
- AI and Machine Learning: Powering Actionable Insights
- Privacy Concerns Around Data Collection
- The Outlook for Bright Insights
About Bright Data
Bright Data has been a key player in the web data industry for over a decade. Founded in Israel in 2008, the company has grown into one of the largest proxy service providers, with over 100 million IPs available across 195 countries.
Bright Data‘s core offering is a robust, reliable proxy network that customers utilize for large-scale web data extraction or website automation. Some key use cases include:
- Web scraping and crawling
- Data mining
- Ad verification
- Competitive research
- Price monitoring
- Market research
- Brand protection
The company emphasizes quality, transparency, and scalability as its network serves Fortune 500 companies across sectors like retail, travel, finance, and more.
Bright Data proxies fully mimic real browsers. The residential IP proxies utilize static IPs from actual devices to avoid blocking. Backconnect rotating proxies offer thousands of IP options that can be automatically rotated to look like different users.
According to Bright Data CEO Or Lenchner, this acquisition aligns with the company‘s vision of providing an end-to-end data solution. Bright Insights builds on the company‘s decade of expertise around large-scale web data collection.
Overview of Market Beyond
Founded in 2016, Market Beyond has quickly emerged as a leading analytics provider focused on ecommerce market intelligence.
The Tel Aviv startup uses advanced data science techniques to transform public web data into actionable insights for retail brands. Specific use cases include:
- Competitor price tracking
- Product availability monitoring
- Analysis of consumer search patterns
- SEO and marketing performance
- Market share of brands and products
Market Beyond collects data from product listing pages, search engines, ecommerce sites, and other public sources. This data feeds into machine learning algorithms and statistical models that identify trends and opportunities.
For example, Market Beyond provided a home goods retailer with a dashboard tracking the in-stock availability of key SKUs across top competitors. This allowed the retailer to capitalize when competitors had out of stocks.
In another case, Market Beyond analyzed search visibility for a clothing brand across keywords, revealing high-potential areas to target with SEO and paid search.
Introducing Bright Insights
With Market Beyond‘s analytics capabilities now part of Bright Data, the company is launching Bright Insights. This new solution will empower enterprise retailers with digital shelf analytics to optimize online sales.
Bright Insights will leverage Bright Data‘s data collection infrastructure to feed key ecommerce metrics into advanced analytics models. This will provide retailers with unique insights around:
Product Pricing: Monitor pricing across competitors to employ dynamic pricing and price matching strategies. Ensure price parity across channels and geographies.
Availability: Track out-of-stocks by geography to avoid losing sales. Identify distribution gaps before competitors.
Discoverability: Gain insights into how shoppers search and which keywords drive conversions. Optimize SEO and PPC campaigns.
Market Share: Understand market and channel share for products and brands. Reverse engineer competitor demand.
Promotions: Analyze competitor promos and discounts to assess discounting impact and shape promotion strategy.
Assortment: Determine optimal product assortment and shelf space for categories based on demand signals.
These actionable insights will help retailers optimize their digital shelf to maximize revenue and profitability.
The High-Growth Ecommerce Analytics Market
The market for ecommerce analytics tools like Bright Insights is experiencing rapid growth, driven by the rise of digital commerce.
According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global ecommerce analytics software market is projected to grow at an 18.5% CAGR from 2022-2027, reaching $7.6 billion.
| Ecommerce Analytics Market Projections | 2022 | 2025 | 2027 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market Size | $3.92B | $6.01B | $7.58B |
| Growth (%) | 18.1% | 18.5% |
Other researchers forecast even higher growth:
- Mordor Intelligence: 19.7% CAGR
- Fortune Business Insights: 24.8% CAGR
This high growth is driven by key trends including:
- Accelerating ecommerce adoption, with ecommerce sales reaching $5 trillion globally in 2022
- Increasing competition between online retailers
- Rising need for data-driven decisions in ecommerce
- Growth of D2C ecommerce
- Omnichannel complexity demanding better analytics
As more sales move online, retailers are aggressively investing in data analytics to optimize strategy and performance across channels. Bright Insights taps directly into this high-growth market opportunity.
Competing Against Analytics Heavyweights
Although the market outlook is strong, Bright Data faces competition from analytics powerhouses like Salesforce, Adobe, and Shopify who provide ecommerce analytics capabilities.
Salesforce offers Einstein Analytics tools for retail including Commerce Insights and Product Insights on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Strengths include CRM integration and omni-channel perspective.
Adobe provides analytics for retailers as part of Adobe Commerce. Adobe Sensei AI powers key insights around shopper behavior. Adobe also offers rich segmentation and attribution capabilities.
Shopify enables merchants to track sales, traffic metrics and more through its built-in Shopify Analytics. This deep POS integration is valuable although functionality can be limited.
Bright Insights aims to compete by leveraging its unmatched data collection scale via Bright Data proxies. Tighter data integration enables unique insights. Bright Insights is also more cost effective versus enterprise platforms with high data, user and integration fees.
However, Bright Data has an uphill battle in winning mindshare from analytics-savvy retailers already using industry leaders like Adobe. Bright Insights may fit better with mid-market brands without enterprise analytics.
Applications Beyond Retail
While Bright Insights is launching with a retail focus, the opportunity exists to expand into other verticals like:
Financial Services: Gain market intelligence on competitors, analyze trends in lending, fintech adoption, and customer acquisition costs.
Travel: Track hotel and airfare pricing changes, monitor accommodation availability, analyze search patterns and consumer intent.
Automotive: Assess inventory levels, pricing shifts, and demand signals across models and geographies.
Real Estate: Understand market price movements, buyer and seller behaviors, property trends, and competitive landscape.
Media and Publishing: Gain readership insights, analyze subscriber acquisition costs, optimize online ad inventory, and more.
The same data collection and analytics capabilities can be applied across many industries. Proxies remain critical for collecting large industry datasets. Bright Insights has strong potential to move into additional verticals over time.
AI and Machine Learning: Powering Actionable Insights
At the core of Bright Insights‘ value proposition is its usage of AI and machine learning to derive insights.
Advanced ML algorithms can analyze extremely large, high-dimensionality datasets that humans cannot easily interpret. Statistical models tease out subtle patterns and non-intuitive relationships in complex retail metrics.
For example, algorithms can:
- Predict out of stocks based on inventory changes, demand forecasts, competitor actions, and external factors.
- Forecast shopper demand for a new product based on consumer search trends and response to similar products.
- Optimize bid prices for millions of PPC keywords based on historical performance data.
However, developing accurate, unbiased ML models requires significant data volume and quality. Bright Data‘s proxies enable the collection of massive training datasets that feed the models powering Bright Insights.
Of course, machine learning has its challenges. Models need continuous tuning. Bad data leads to bad insights. AI mistakes can be costly. Bright Data will need to invest heavily in its data science capabilities to compete in analytics.
Privacy Concerns Around Data Collection
The large-scale data collection powering Bright Insights does raise some privacy concerns. Using millions of proxies to gather vast datasets creates significant potential for abuse.
Some question whether it is ethical to aggregate such data trails across people‘s web browsing activities without their consent. Even public data can reveal sensitive information in aggregate.
Bright Data will need to be extremely transparent about its data practices. The company must demonstrate high standards around:
- Anonymizing collected data by removing personal identifiers
- Securing data with encryption, access controls, and authentication
- Establishing stringent data governance policies
- Clearly communicating data usage purposes to customers
- Enabling user choice where feasible
By being proactive on privacy protection, Bright Data can build trust with customers and the public around its Bright Insights capabilities.
The Outlook for Bright Insights
In summary, the launch of Bright Insights puts Bright Data in a strong strategic position within the high-growth digital analytics market.
Leveraging its core competency in large-scale data collection, Bright Insights offers a differentiated end-to-end solution for retailers seeking actionable intelligence. While Bright Data faces robust competition, its proprietary proxy infrastructure offers unique benefits.
To succeed, Bright Insights will need to prove the accuracy of its insights, demonstrate tangible ROI for customers, and carefully address data privacy concerns.
With sound execution and relentless innovation in its analytics, Bright Insights could become a formidable force in powering the next generation of data-driven decision making for ecommerce. The opportunity ahead shines bright.
