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What Is Audience Targeting and Parsing in Marketing?

What Is Audience Targeting and Parsing in Marketing?

Target audience parsing is a process that aims to gather detailed information about prospective buyers of products and services using open sources. This information will ultimately allow you to create targeted marketing campaigns and achieve high sales results. Despite the fact that there is nothing illegal about parsing, not every service is willing to share its information, so if multiple requests are noticed, the IP address can be banned. From this article, you will learn the details of target audience parsing and how using proxies helps in doing it at any level.
 

For What Purposes Is Parsing Used?

  • Website content. If you are running a commercial website, it is not always clear what kind of content is best to publish to improve behavioral factors and generate sales. For example, you have a website about plastic windows, and you decided to create a blog. Great, but there are not so many key queries of an informational nature. Moreover, not all of them are commercial. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to competitors, and this is much easier after you conduct audience parsing.
  • Monitoring the price situation on the market. In some niches prices change regularly, every day, so you should always keep an eye on the offers of niche leaders and your direct competitors. Using proxies allows you to set up automated parsing and get information about price offers online.
  • Selecting products for catalogs. In many niches, the product grid is very large, it may contain both new and outdated items. Therefore, it is important to offer current product items in your catalog.
  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization). To save budget, it is always important to pay attention to key phrases that bring real sales. Parsing the audience will help to highlight and categorize them.
  • Audit of external link. Links are the basis of promotion in search engines, but every SEO expert knows that it is not the quantity but the quality that matters. Parsing allows you to monitor external links to make decisions on extending their placement and buying new ones.
  • Collecting all kinds of information from competitors and partners. It is always good to have an up-to-date catalog of competitors and partners in case there is a lack of goods or on the contrary, an excess. Usually such databases are created in Google Sheets. They should be updated regularly to help you quickly conclude contracts.
     

Laws and Restrictions

Is it legal to do parsing? If we are talking about information that is in the public domain, then yes. For example, a company has published a contact phone number on their website. You have the full right to copy it and add it to your Google Sheets document. And you can do that with a thousand of your competitors or potential partners.

But let's look at this situation from the other side. For example, you are interested in a list of product items from a large online store. You start the parsing process, and as a result, the site is stressed. It looks like a DDOS attack, although your goals are quite harmless.

Despite the fact that we are not talking about hacking or any other illegal actions, access from your IP address can be, and most likely will be denied. And this is correct, because the website administrator does not know what your intentions are, he just has to solve the problems that have arisen as a result of increased traffic.

Moreover, there are laws to protect copyright. If you parse articles and post them on social media or other websites, it will be considered a violation of the law. Even if it's a phone number, it's also illegal to share that information, because it's personal data.

In short, parsing is legal, but website owners are usually wary of increased activity when they see multiple requests from the same IP address and the same device. That's why parsing requires proxies that help to hide yourself.
 

Technical Aspects of Audience Parsing

Theoretically, it is possible to parse information manually. But it takes a lot of time. Automated services speed up and optimize these processes.

  • First, you send a request to process the page code.
  • The parser program creates a clear and readable text from the HTML code.
  • The parser organizes the resulting data and saves it into a .xls file or some other format.
  • You can parse not only websites, but also social networks, YouTube and other sources. For example, you can create a list of 100 YouTube channels on financial topics with the number of subscribers, total number of views and contact email. This is a quality audience of advertisers that you can use to promote your products or services.

If we are talking about communities in social networks, it is common to parse keywords that accompany the selected posts, geographical label, and interests of the audience. For example, you need to create a list of a target audience that is interested in buying baby products. To do this, you need to parsing and create a database by including the following information:

  • First Name;
  • Last name;
  • Age; 
  • Gender (male or female);
  • Marital Status;
  • Number of children;
  • Education;
  • Subscriptions to other groups (this will help to better understand the needs and allow you to remove fake subscribers who are added to improve statistics);
  • Geography (place of residence);
  • Interests and hobbies.
     

Parsing of Visual Materials

Most often marketers need to parse text, but sometimes there is a need to collect photos, images, infographics and illustrations. This can be done in different ways:

  • If you need to collect a few dozen images, the fastest and cheapest way is to do everything by yourself.
  • With large amounts of work, you can use the services of freelancers, and other virtual assistants.
  • With large amounts of work, you can use the services of freelancers, virtual assistants.
  • Such parsers are freely available, but most often you have to develop them from scratch.
  • If you don't want to create your own parsers, you can use an online parser that will help you create a database with the required information for a small fee.
     

How to Choose a Parsing Service

If you are not a professional hacker who creates and sells databases, most likely, online parsing services will be enough for you. Choose them based on the following parameters:

  • First, determine whether the online service can handle your request at all. For example, if you want to parse a website, you will most likely have to develop your own solutions.
  • Price. There are paid and free parsers. It is better to use paid ones, as free ones usually have reduced functionality, or offer test access with very few features.
  • What can be parsed? Choose the parsing service that works with the platform you need, for example, with Facebook. 
  • Object. Text, photos, pictures, groups. 
  • Method of operation - there are stationary and cloud-based parsers. Stationary ones are installed on your computer and cloud-based ones work in the cloud. It does not matter in principle, but cloud services are more convenient, as they do not require computing resources of your device and can work when it is turned off.
     

Popular Parsing Services

  • Cerebro Target is one of the leading services for those who work with the popular social network VK. It has a large number of settings, allows you to choose groups and select potential clients by different parameters. For example, you can select people who are members of the same groups. This allows you to significantly increase the final quality of the resulting database. The cost depends on the functionality you need.
  • Segmento Target is a powerful tool for working with VK and other social networks. It works very fast, the parsing process takes a few seconds. Users have access to a very convenient task manager. You can see how often the user visits the selected social network. Together with other parameters, this information allows you to significantly improve the quality of your database.
     

Conclusion

Promoting a website in search engines, selling products and services through social networks - all these processes are impossible without active work on gathering the target audience. Proxies allow you to parse websites, social networks and any other resources. With their help you will be able to collect the target audience, segment it and launch profitable advertising campaigns.

KeyProxy offers high quality mobile proxies for a wide range of uses. 99.8% uptime and speeds of 3-90 Mbit/s make KeyProxy's service a top offer on the market!