Websites provide advisory services, research, and user reviews on SaaS companies to help users find the right product for their needs.
Information and reviews shared by genuine users of your product or service is the strongest recommendation that can be received by your potential customers. This is why online user reviews are important for eCommerce and SaaS companies. Potential customers go to websites providing advisory services before they pick a product and compare your ratings and reviews with your competitors. This plays a big role during their process of deciding which product to choose.
It is important for your business to track these ratings and reviews from websites and compare them with your competitors, make sure you are not falling behind, and give a trustful image to your potential customers. To achieve this goal, you need to go to each website providing advisory service, compare your company’s ratings with your competitors, check reviews, and identify areas for improvement. Moreover, this should be done on a regular basis. Synthetic applications help you automate this process and save you time!
With Synthetic applications, you can extract numerical data from any website or API endpoint, chart them, and receive reports periodically. Extracting information from websites based on intervals, visualizing them, and defining alert rules helps smart businesses to react in real-time when something important to them significantly changes.
For more information about Synthetic monitoring applications and different use cases for extracting numbers and metrics from web pages, see how to extract numerical data from a Web Page for Dashboarding and Alerting.
In this article, we will show you how to extract metrics from a web page with Sematext Synthetics. See your company’s as well as your competitors’ ratings on an advisory website, chart them, build reports, and create alert rules.
How to Extract Company Ratings from a Review Website using Sematext
We want to track Sematext’s rating on softwareadvice.com and compare it with its competitors.
We can see this from https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sematext/technology.
As a product manager at Sematext, I want to avoid going to this website every day or any other similar website and track these numbers. So I will create a Synthetic Browser Monitor, extract the overall ratings, create a report based on these numbers, and schedule the report to receive the information periodically.
If you interested in learning more, we’ve created a use case specifically on How to Extract Numerical Data from a Web Page for Dashboarding and Alerting.
Extracting metrics via user journey scripts
First, you need to create a Synthetic App.
Then click to create a Browser Monitor to write a journey script that extracts company ratings from the given website.
Then write your user journey script. Synthetic monitors can be scheduled to run from multiple different public locations in a specified time interval. For this use case, we only need one location and we can set a long interval. See best practices tips to make the best use of synthetic monitoring and keep your costs minimal.
You can repeat the same process above and create different monitors to follow other companies’ ratings or enhance the script above to extract rating information for other companies.
Visualizing Extracted Data
After your monitor runs, you will start receiving rating data for different companies. To chart these numbers, navigate to the Sematext Dashboards and create a custom report.
In this example, we visualized Sematext’s rating with a numerical component and created a bar chart to compare it with its competitors.
You can always add more visualizations by clicking on the ‘Add Component’ button in the top right corner of the report above. From the add/edit component window pick the metric you want to chart, add more data series, and select the visualization type.
After you have your full report, you can schedule it to receive it periodically.
Creating alert rules
Create alert rules when the extracted metric exceeds or goes below a certain threshold or deviates from the baseline and define priority for the alerts.
Below we defined an alert rule to get notified if Sematext’s rating goes below 4.
With Sematext Notification Hooks, you can choose from various platforms to receive alert notifications. Also, third-party integrations with various incident management platforms give you the ability to automatically create incidents, assign them to the responsible team, and define priorities to address issues or act on detected changes in the monitored APIs and websites.
Summary
In conclusion, Sematext Cloud provides a powerful way of extracting numerical data from webpages, API endpoints, or browser APIs, charting them, and setting up alerting rules. You can track changes in another website or API or your own.