The Driving Force of Search Engine Ad Intelligence

Main challenges of collecting search ads intelligence

As mentioned above, the driving force behind businesses that offer search engine marketing intelligence is web scraping. However, this process has its challenges in a number of ways.

Security measures

Large websites, as well as search engines, have measures to safeguard the data contained therein and protect their web servers from being overwhelmed by excessive web scraping requests. These measures, packaged in the form of anti-scraping techniques, include CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), IP blocks and blacklisting, and general pattern monitoring algorithms.

CAPTCHA is one of the most universally used anti-bot techniques, making it a common web scraping challenge for any company. It works by monitoring web activity to identify bot-like browsing behavior upon which it interrupts further browsing until the CAPTCHA puzzle is solved. In-house web scrapers are often unable to solve the puzzle, subsequently impacting their performance.At the same time, IP blocks are equally common. This anti-bot technique entails blocking an IP address responsible for making multiple web requests in a manner that does not mimic human behavior. That said, there are ways to avoid getting blacklisted or blocked, especially when web scraping.

Layout changes

Websites regularly change their layout, including the most popular search engines. It is not uncommon for users to notice the latter’s alterations, which sometimes are in the form of newly introduced features or shapes. In the SEO world, some of these changes foreshadow the future of search engine optimization as they push an insufficient snippet into the direction the search algorithms are taking. 

While the motivation behind the changes is a better user experience for users, the layout changes complicate the process of collecting search ads intelligence. For instance, the alterations mean that data is displayed in different locations, which negatively affects the performance of automated data extraction tools.

Geo-locations

Notably, the same search query can yield different search results when used by searchers from other countries. In fact, some content may not even be available in some geographical locations.

Unstructured data

Scraping SERP results data and ad intelligence is one thing while making sense of it through analysis is another. A company may have a team that knows how to do the former, but this only results in unstructured data, which is impossible to analyze. As such, the web scraper should also convert the unstructured data into a structured format.

Resources

Building an in-house web scraping tool to collect search ad intelligence requires a lot of dedication in the form of time and money. For instance, a company that opts for this route should have a dedicated team of developers for this task. 

This means that such a company will spend a lot of financial funds extracting advertising intelligence from search engines. Even then, the appreciable performance of the scrapers is not guaranteed.

Personalized search

Major search engines personalize search results for all users irrespective of whether they are signed in or not. The platform relies on an anonymous cookie in the user’s browser that relays search activity spanning over 180 days. Although this enhances the user experience, it may be harmful to companies and their quest to develop robust digital marketing strategies.

For instance, a search query may show that the organization’s site is ranked third while, in reality, it is ninth or even on the third page. This means that if care is not taken when collecting ad intelligence, the scraped data could be rendered inaccurate and, therefore, useless.

Solutions for efficient search engine scraping

Businesses that offer search engine ad intelligence usually invest in their own in-house solution that collects the required search engine data. In this case, proxies are crucial to ensure a smooth public web scraping process.

Using proxies

Proxies are used alongside in-house built web scrapers to help mimic human behavior, thereby preventing IP blocking, as well as providing access to geo-restricted sites containing ads, keywords, and other SEO-related data. Importantly, by imitating human behavior, proxies effectively prevent CAPTCHAs, meaning that the process of gathering search ad intelligence proceeds smoothly. Selecting the right proxies for the task may require some knowledge of how different types of proxies operate. You can read our article on the differences between datacenter vs residential proxies to find out more.

Using ready-to-use tools

Due to the complexity of the most popular search engines, internal web scraping tools face challenges to deliver quality results. In this case, companies that specialize in offering ad intelligence choose another approach: outsource reliable web scraping tools to facilitate the data gathering process. Usually, reliable data gathering tools ensure that the data collected is structured and, therefore, ready to use. Also, such tools are suitable for large-scale data gathering of information related to ads and search results. For example, Scraper APIs are a set of website crawler tools built to collect public web data from complex e-commerce websites and search engines. An in-built proxy rotator feature that rotates IP addresses, preventing detection and promoting anonymity. Notably, SERP Scraper API is used to extract search engine marketing intelligence.

Conclusion

Collecting public data on ads or search results, or any other form of information from websites can be challenging, for one, because of the sheer volume. Factors such as anti-bot techniques and regularly changing structure and layouts compound the challenges.

Businesses choose between building an in-house web scraper or using a ready-to-use tool. The former works best alongside a proxy, while the latter is ideal for companies that want to escape dealing with data collection issues and get ready-to-use data. If you want to dig deeper into the topic, here is another article on how to acquire data directly from search engines. Also, read a case study on how our Datacenter Proxies powered Searchmetrics’ unique web crawler and how utilizing Real-Time Crawler (now known as Scraper APIs) helps them gather public data effortlessly and provide the best service to their clients.