Often, for-profit and nonprofit organizations look at data as a means to facilitate better, more informed, and faster decisions. The business data is used to generate insights into various aspects of the company’s operations, including internal processes and customer-oriented undertakings. Importantly, there are multiple types of business data, including customer data, marketing metrics, sales data, web traffic figures, and more.
This data must come from somewhere. To get a hold of the data, companies either buy the data or build from scratch by leveraging the power of web scraping tools such as the web scraper API. Each of these approaches has its pros and cons. Thus, before deciding whether to buy or scrape business prospects, it is extremely crucial to consider several factors. In this article, we explore each of them.
Buying Business Data
Buying business data entails purchasing these data from brokers. The demand for the services of data brokers has, in fact, seen the industry grow. Estimates currently show that this segment is worth over $200 billion.
Pros of Buying Business Data
Purchasing business data enables you to benefit in the following ways:
- Convenience: the data is availed immediately. As a business owner, you do not need to worry about how to collect the data as well as the best practices.
- Cost-effectiveness: buying business data may be cheaper over the long term because you do not have to worry about maintenance costs or the resources – in terms of the number of employees – you need to allocate to build the data collection tools.
- Fast: buying data offers near-immediate access to business data.
- Quality and accuracy: the data brokers usually rely on tested and well-refined solutions that guarantee the accuracy of the data.
Cons of Buying Business Data
Unfortunately, although this approach offers multiple benefits, it is problematic. For instance, data brokers do not disclose how they have analyzed their data or where they have collected the data. In this regard, business owners cannot confirm the accuracy of the data, including the segmentation of the data in cases where the data brokers perform limited analysis.
Fortunately, you can avoid this glaring problem by building your vault of data.
Building Business Data
This approach mainly involves extracting data from websites through a process known as web scraping. Here, you can use pre-built web scraping tools like the web scraper API. Being an Application Programming Interface, the web scraper API facilitates communication between your in-house data analysis software and the web scraping tool. It even supports the automated transfer of data.
Alternatively, you can create your own web scraping solution. However, this route is more time-consuming and will require additional resources – in the form of time and budgetary allocations to pay developers. In this regard, using off-the-shelf web scraper APIs makes more sense from a business perspective. This is especially so if your core business does not involve software development.
Pros of Building Business Data
Building business data through automated web scraping offers the following benefits:
- It gives you control of the data collection process, meaning that you can vouch for the accuracy and quality of the data
- A web scraper API will organize and optimize the data, thereby easing data analysis
- The use of pre-built web scraping solutions is cost-effective, fast, and convenient
- The process is automated
Cons of Building Business Data
The disadvantages of building business data stem from the fact that websites have inbuilt techniques aimed at stopping web scraping. Thus, if you use simple web scraping solutions, you will likely encounter roadblocks. Such hurdles include CAPTCHAs, IP address blocking, and unanswered web requests.
Even so, you can easily deal with the problem by using a web scraper API or any other advanced web scraping solution. The web scraper API, in particular, leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to solve CAPTCHAs, promote targeted data collection, and guarantee a 100% success rate. In addition, it uses a proxy rotator feature that prevents IP blocking. Take a look at a recent post on scraping tools from one of the top web scraping solutions providers.
Which Should You Choose: Buying or Building Business Data?
We reckon that you should build business data. This approach lets you use sophisticated and reliable web scraping tools like the web scraper API, which promotes convenience, high data accuracy, speed, and data optimization. In addition, this approach gives you control of the data collection, meaning that you can ascertain the sources of the data.
In addition, the web scraper API promotes scalability. This is because you can use the integrated proxy servers to access geo-specific content from geo-restricted content. You also do not have to worry about constantly updating or maintaining the applications.
Conclusion
In the current internet age, where businesses are increasingly building an online footprint, data is becoming more and more important for success and competitiveness. In this regard, companies can either buy data or build using web scraping. Based on the latter’s over the former’s, we recommend that businesses scrape business prospects instead of buying.
