Why is it Important to Get Information About Competitors?

Today’s fast-paced, online retail world allows consumers to be more demanding than ever. A better product always seems to be a click away. Consumers that aren’t happy about a product have an increasing number of online reviews and discussion forums they can complain in – and offer competing products to other forum users. 

While it is critical for brands and organizations to stay on top of customers’ mention of their own products and brands, it’s just as important that they keep track of their competition. An online reviews API that delivers online reviews in near real-time can help brands and organizations better understand how their customers reacted to their competitors’ products. This information can be vital for these brands and organizations to have a competitive edge for upgrading their own product – or developing a completely new product that better suits their customers’ demands. This is particularly valuable for brands or organizations with hundreds of products they need to monitor simultaneously. 

An advanced reviews data API sorts and filters through the thousands of reviews from millions of sources that exist on the various review sites, structuring them accordingly. This enables brands and organizations to find reviews according to specific organizations or brand names, keywords, authors, publication dates, countries, and more — leading them to important business insights. 

It also normalizes the rating reviews while at the same time applying basic customer sentiment. For example, a rating of over 4 is given a positive sentiment while a rating of 2 or below is given a negative rating. An advanced reviews data API also delivers the full text and threads involved in an online review so that the customer is fully informed of the context of the review, including basic customer sentiment.

Enterprise-level organizations can use larger datasets of reviews of specific products (i.e. movies, companies, or hotels) to apply predictive analytics, risk modeling, natural language processing (NLP) machine learning, or advanced sentiment analysis. Increasing numbers of organizations are leveraging web data for these types of advanced analysis, relying on high-quality, relevant datasets for the foundation of their algorithmic models.   

Webz’s online reviews API delivers web and media monitoring companies the data their customers need so that they have up-to-the-minute information about their customers, products, and competition. Its crawlers extract and structure online reviews from the web so brands and organizations get relevant, accurate data in machine-readable JSON or XML format. As we like to say here at Webz, your analysis is only as good as your data.