Businesses use web data mining as a means of developing more effective marketing campaigns, enables an individual or a company to promote business, understand marketing dynamics, new promotions and Internet trends, competitive analysis and more. Web data mining is an incredibly useful tool for businesses to make more effective marketing strategies that better serve their customers.
Web data mining is done with the use of a web scraping tool through the IP address of the individual visiting a website. An IP address is a numerical label that gets assigned to each device that is connected to the internet, and can be static, meaning that they are permanently affixed to the host computer or device, or dynamic, which means that the IP address is assigned anew each time the device boots up.
However, there have been recent developments that may put a damper on using an IP address as a source for web data mining.The Federal Trade Commission has called for a Do Not Track mechanism, which would allow Internet users to request not to be tracked. Anonymous browsing or IP address privacy would block IP addresses from data scraping, making it much more difficult to mine for information on the part of the marketer.
While this mechanism has not yet been enacted, there is a strong possibility that it will be. Marketers may want to begin the process of finding another way to mine for information, before they are out of luck permanently.
