Web Scraping for Brand Mentions

Brands are assets to companies, not much different than the equipment you have to operate your business or the value of your inventory. Yet, brands are fluid and change in value based on what others experience.

Online brand monitoring becomes a critical asset for businesses that want to maintain the value of their company’s image and build success.

Looking For Proxies?

Residential, datacenter, mobile… we’ve got everything you need!

Take A Look

Web scraping for brand mentions is one way to monitor what people are saying about your company online. It is effective because it allows you to pick up very specific details about your brand that are important to your business. There are many ways to do this, including the use of brand monitoring software.

However, web scraping could be the most empowering option for most companies – and it is something you can start using now.

What Is Online Brand Reputation Monitoring?

Online brand monitoring is the process of finding mentions of your company’s brand online. It allows you to learn when a customer leaves a review or when a news article about your company is released. As you monitor your brand’s mentions online, you can use that information to shape decisions, marketing campaigns, and product and service updates.

By collecting and measuring mentions of your company, you are able to gain a better understanding of what customers think. You should focus on:

• Your brand’s online presence or all places online where the brand is noted
• Your reputation, which is an analysis of what consumers and the general public think about your brand’s services and products
• Customer feedback, which is a direct mention of a service or product your company provided and some of the most valuable information to customers considering working with you

There are various digital channels to monitor. You can (and should) monitor your brand mentions across a wide range of digital channels since this helps to provide a comprehensive picture of what your company’s reputation is. That includes social media sites, review websites where customers leave updates, blogs discussing your company, third-party websites that mention your company, perhaps through a review or opinion piece, and news articles that shed light on your company. Each of these areas is an opportunity to capture data that can then be used to better understand your target audience.

What Is Web Scraping for Brand Mention?

Web scraping is a process of capturing information online from various websites that can help you make decisions. With web scraping, you have a tool you have designed to specifically monitor the internet for mentions of your brand. It will work in the background whenever you desire to look for information and send you, sometimes, real-time feedback on what’s being said.

It also helps to know that you can also use web scraping to monitor your competitor’s brand mentions online. That can give you the ability to easily capture insights into how well your competitors are doing and how you can beat them.

With web scraping, you will design a tool using a step-by-step process (or you can use our web scraping API to help you get started faster) that will visit websites, capture the specific information you want, such as any brand mention, and then report it back to you. Using this process, you can consistently monitor what others are saying about your products and services.

Why Not Use Brand Monitoring Services Instead?

You will find brand monitoring services and a wide range of tools that promise to work for you in the same way. These off-the-shelf solutions could be somewhat helpful as an initial process, but they simply cannot provide you with the depth of information and knowledge you need.

Available solutions will collect some data – but not all data. They often will collect this information and then sell it to anyone who wants it. That means that you are getting the same data as everyone else is. That does not provide you with a lot of flexibility for getting custom brand mentions at a competitive price. In fact, if you are getting the same information the competitors are getting, you are not really getting anything useful.

Off-the-shelf products use text-based data analysis. That means they will scrape the websites you instruct them to, but they rarely capture all of the details that are important to your website. With smartphones out there, video and images can also be powerful components of your brand reputation online. You need that information.

Here is another key reason why you may not want to use brand mention software like this. They are expensive. You pay for each scrape every time, and you may find that over time, you are not getting much of the value you thought you would. Because of that expense, it can be hard to rationalize the use of these tools on a consistent basis. (Go ahead, give them a free trial, and then see the power of web scraping for yourself!)

This is why web scraping for online mentions is better. It enables you to remain fully in control over the process so you can consistently capture the information you need and use it in real-time to make decisions. It may seem like this is a complicated process, but it does not have to be.

Define What You Want to Accomplish with Online Brand Monitoring

Before providing you with the specifics of how to get started in brand monitoring with web scraping, let’s discuss an important, more recent update. That is sentiment analysis. One of the most important reasons to use brand mention web scraping is not just to collect endless reviews about your company but to understand what those reviews mean.

Consumer sentiment is becoming a very powerful and helpful tool today. It is a way for companies to gain more insight and valuable data about the way customers are experiencing their company. For example, use a customer sentiment tool. It will apply natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to provide an analysis of what those reviews and brand mentions mean. Generally, this will rate them as positive, negative, or neutral. You can then gain more insight into the specific areas of concern. Perhaps your customer service needs improvement, or your product failed to work.

With this process, you automate web scraping data so that you can capture more of the information you need. You can then use that information to make better decisions for your company.

The question is, why? Why would you want to take these steps? Here are some reasons why both brand mentions and sentiment analysis can help your business:

• Learn what customers think of your products and services in real time. This allows you to make changes as needed.
• Tackle would-be challenges and potential PR problems quickly before they spread and become reputation harming.
• Monitor your competitors to find out what your customers like better about their product than yours. Use this information to monitor changes, upgrades, and even challenges that other products have so that you can capitalize on this.
• Monitor the success of your marketing campaigns and other efforts. That way, you gain insight into how well your company is performing and the ROI you are actually getting.
• Use this information to help you make decisions about new products to launch or trends to follow.

In many ways, online brand monitoring enables you to improve your business’s reputation, grow your online reach, and ensure that you compete within your market. What’s more, when you use web scraping for brand monitoring, it costs you very little to get the results you need.

How to Build Your Own Online Brand Monitoring and Brand Mention Tool

Numerous AI web scraping tools are available to use. However, because of how important online brand monitoring is, we want to discuss the process of building your own online brand monitoring tool. It may be easier to do so than you realize.

Your objective is to extract online data about your brand from a variety of websites and other resources. You want to monitor how a brand is being discussed across websites, social media, news articles, and forums. To do this, we’ll walk you through the process of using several key Python libraries to help you with the process. Then, we’ll discuss the specific strategies for analyzing that information to get usable details.

We’ve previously created a guide on how to web scrape in Python. You can reference that for added details, but let’s breakdown the process of how to use web scraping for brand reputation monitoring online.

Download the Libraries Necessary. Python libraries provide you with shortcuts to capturing the content you need online. To get started, you’ll need to use Python 3.4+. You’ll want to use the most up to date version of Python and, for Windows devices, you’ll need to check the “PATH installation” to have an executable tool.

The next process is to download the specific libraries necessary for this task. There are various options out there, but these are the most important to have for this type of web scraping project:

• Requests: The Requests library allows you to send a request for content to the website you desire. You will send HTTP requests, including POST and GET, to the website’s server to inform it of what you need. Requests is a very easy to use library. It has only a few lines of code to use and keep things rather straightforward.
• Beautiful Soup: This Python library is a parsing tool. That means it will extract data from HTML. It turns invalid data into a parse tree, which allows you to scrape it. BeautifulSoup works with Requests to help you capture the information you need.
• LXML: This library is built for parsing with both HTML and XML files. If you are going to use large amounts of data – and over time, this is likely to become a common need – you will need to upgrade to the use of LXML.
• Selenium: Selenium is a Python library that helps you navigate JavaScript websites. Many of today’s websites are built with JavaScript, which means that they are likely to have dynamic content. Dynamic content is far more challenging to web scrape because it requires some type of user interaction – filling out a form or getting past a CAPTCHA. Selenium is smart enough to work around that. It will allow you to capture the information you need so that your web scraping project does not get hung up on these areas. This is necessary for web scraping so you don’t get blocked.
• Scrapy: Scrapy is an essential framework that includes a scraping and crawling package. It will include request handling, parsing responses, and data pipelines. You can use all of these tools without having to actually learn a dozen computer program languages. Scrapy will work with the libraries discussed here, and it will help to automate much of this process. You can use Scrapy for web scraping from the start as well.

Now that you have all of the libraries and tools you need, you can begin to build your web scraping tool. Remember that most of the time, you will find this process to be straightforward. Do not get hung up on the initial steps being long – you only have to download and set up this process once, and then you can use it on an ongoing basis without limitations or time-consuming details.

Looking For Proxies?

Residential, datacenter, mobile… we’ve got everything you need!

Take A Look

Put In Place a Proxy Service. Before you move forward, you’ll need to put in place some protections for your business and your own personal privacy. To do that, you need to consider the use of a proxy service. A proxy is an intermediary – it is a stop on the route to the target website to a server that’s separate from your own. It works to mask your identification by changing your IP address to one that is completely unrelated to your company.

The proxy service will use rotating proxies, in which the proxy IP address changes every time. This can be beneficial for brand monitoring over time because it will allow you to avoid getting blocked by the target website. Those websites do not want you to pull information because it taxes their bandwidth. With proxies, they do not know you are consistently taking these steps and instead believe it is a unique identity every time.

Use our guide to proxy settings and proxy setup to help you to get a proxy in place. We recommend using Rayobyte to facilitate the process.

By taking these steps, you are able to create a web scraper that is flexible and more adaptable to your specific needs. That includes working as a cohesive brand monitoring tool for your business. We strongly encourage you to work through this process rather than using a pre-made tool. The difference in the results can be incredible and even more affordable.

Review the Process of Establishing a Web Scraper. Let’s list out the specific steps to take now to get this process in place for you.

• Get the most up-to-date version of Python. We recommend Python 3.4+.
• Get Requests library by inputting the following into your pip command: python -m pip install requests.
• Get BeautifulSoup in place using the following command: pip install beautifulsoup4
• Get LXML online by downloading the following common line: pip install lxml
• Install Selenium so that you can navigate JavaScript websites using the following command: pip install selenium
• Install Scrapy to pull the entire project together for you using the installation guide for Scrapy.
• Initialize the Python project. This means setting up a new project.
• Connect to the target URL you want to scrape. Obtain the complete URL to the target page from the web browser for this. Then, all the information is pasted into the code.
• The next step is to parse the HTML content, which is what BeautifulSoup will do for you. It will pull out the specific terms – like brand mentions – that are important to you.
• Select the HTML elements with Beautiful Soup, based on what you want to collect, such as by text, by tag, or by attribute.
• Extract the data from the elements. This pulls that information so it can be analyzed.
• Implement crawling logic.
• Extract to CSV file ( or utilize any other tool you are planning to use to hold your data.

Once you take these steps, you’ll be ready to run your newly created code. The code will find brand mentions you have selected and download the information into a file you can later use. But you should also consider going one step further.

Using Sentiment Analysis Tools for Brand Reputation Monitoring

Once you have all of this data, you can sit down and read it. That’s going to take time and a lot of hard work if you have a lot of brand mentions. Instead, you may want to employ sentiment analysis tools for brand mention monitoring. This includes the use of NLP and sentiment analysis to determine the public perception of your brand.

NLP will provide you with valuable insights into how people feel and express themselves about your brand. Web scraping lets you collect the data, and customer sentiment analysis tools help you categorize that data as positive, negative, or neutral. This then allows you to capture specific data points that can help you determine what customers like and do not like about your company.

Companies use online brand monitoring like this for a variety of tasks:

• Track customer opinions: Understanding the opinions of your customers will allow you to make modifications over time to better understand what your customers need and want.
• Manage competitor strategies: Stay up to date on your competitors so that you can consistently remain competitive in your offerings, prices, and customer experience opportunities.
• Monitor the industry: You can also use brand reputation tools like this to monitor changes in the industry as a whole and how those could impact your brand. Being able to identify emerging trends, for example, can be a powerful way of managing your business’s brand over time.

With online brand reputation monitoring, you capture these details in real time. Your web scraping tool will operate in the background and alert you to insights as they come in. By building out your web scraper to include customer sentiment analysis, such as through BERT models, you can truly understand the value of what is being said about your company.

What You Can Do with Online Brand Monitoring Now

With web scraping for online brand monitoring, you have very few limitations. Once you realize the importance of your brand reputation and how vast it can change with the influence of a digital world, you’ll be well on your way to getting valuable information.

We want to ensure that you consider ethical considerations. You should always comply with all website terms of service and data privacy laws applicable to your tasks. You should never use online brand monitoring services or tools that will overcome these rules, which could affect how well your business operates.

Getting started is easy to do. We recommend starting with putting in place our proxy services at Rayobyte to protect your identity as a first step. You can also use our web scraping API to cut a few corners and get through the process a bit quicker. Once you do that, you can start using online brand monitoring in no time. By leveraging web scraping for brand monitoring, businesses can gain valuable insights, refine their marketing strategies, and improve customer engagement. Check out what Rayobyte can do to help you with this process now and get started on your project.

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.