Proxies for Review Monitoring: What You Need to Know
One of the most important aspects of any online business is review monitoring. Knowing what the customers are saying is usually the bedrock of many critical business moves, such as understanding customer experience, product development, and sales and marketing.
To ignore review monitoring is to ignore the many benefits that the internet is offering your e-commerce business. Of course, review monitoring can be quite challenging because gathering vast amounts of data required for such monitoring is hard. This is where web scraping comes in.
What is review monitoring?
Review monitoring is a technique used for monitoring and collecting public online conversations and comments about a brand and its goods and services. The process helps keep a tab on customers’ feedback and the different places the brand is being mentioned.
And usually, some of the places companies need to keep an eye on include multiple websites, such as popular search engines and social media channels.
The negative reviews are promptly addressed, and the positive ones are used to make certain business decisions. Together, the information companies collect can then be used to improve and maintain a better brand image.
Why is review monitoring essential for brand reliability?
It is important to demonstrate brand reliability if companies truly want to record any significant growth and success. When customers think of brands they want to buy from, they want a brand they can trust and rely on to service their needs and satisfy their pain points accurately. And these customers will only know they can trust you when they read reviews. 72% of buyers said they would trust a business more after reading positive reviews.
Therefore, since reviews can determine customer reliability, the right thing to do would be to find a way to monitor and control these reviews. Below are some reasons why review monitoring is essential for e-commerce businesses:
- To provide better customer experience
When it comes to customers, the only way to treat them better is to know what they are saying. Listening to them through review monitoring helps you do this effortlessly. Interestingly, this leads to increased profit as better customer services often bring increased sales.
2. For better product development
The surest way to win in today’s market is to build and develop products that cater to buyers’ specific needs, and review monitoring can help expose what these needs are.
3. To build and maintain a better brand
To many customers, a better brand is not just one that produces quality products but also prioritizes customers’ feedback.
And the first step to prioritising customers’ feedback is to gather their comments and honest opinions, and this can only be done through review monitoring.
4. To generate more revenue
Review monitoring helps to influence sales and, invariably, profit and revenue indirectly. About 63% of customers say they usually read reviews before making purchases. Companies that know this are always looking for ways to better control their online reviews.
Importance of web scraping in review monitoring
Web scraping is defined as the process used for extracting raw public information from multiple sources, including websites, key marketplaces, and social media. It is used in review monitoring to extract online conversations from various platforms.
A useful review monitoring needs to cover as many platforms as possible, and web scraping provides a more comfortable alternative to this task.
With web scraping, companies can cover multiple online conversations sources at once, gather the most important reviews and comments, respond promptly and appropriately, and still save time and other resources.
Main types of proxies for review monitoring
Proxies are crucial for most web scraping projects, and even though there are several proxies in the market, not all can do efficient review monitoring.
The only proxies you should ever consider using to collect your customers’ comments should prevent internet protocol (IP) blocking and unblock geo-restricted content, as well as deal with major data extraction issues such as CAPTCHA. Residential proxies are considered the best type of proxies for review monitoring. If you want to learn more about proxies for review monitoring, we suggest you check the Oxylabs website for more information.
Conclusion
Review monitoring is crucial for brands, and proxies play a huge role in web scraping. It entails collecting public information from multiple sources, an activity which those sources would like to prevent. Proxies do not only make review monitoring more comfortable, but they also remove any impediment that might stop you from doing successful tracking. Residential proxies are worth considering when choosing the right tools for review monitoring.
