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Use Cases of Programming for Digital Marketing

  • rei-wakayama
  • May 19, 2024
  • 4 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Posted: Aug, 19, 2021

Updated: May 19, 2024


While programming may not be a prerequisite for digital marketers, a bit of knowledge will go a long way. In this post, I will share some examples of how R and python, the de-facto standard for marketing technology at scale, can be useful for digital marketers.


Python for Digital Marketing

First, here are the most common python modules for SEO.

  • webbrowser: opens a browser to a specific page

  • requests: downloads files and webpages from the internet

  • bs4: parses html and xml

  • selenium: launches and controls a web browser

  • google-search-results: scrape and parse Google, Google Scholar, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo, Ebay results using SerpApi

  • xml.etree.ElementTree: parses and creates xml data

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webbrowser is part of the python standard library, so it should automatically be installed when you installed python3. For the remaining modules, you can install them with pip, which is also pre-installed. Simply type pip install followed by the module name. For example, pip install bs4.


To check whether the modules are installed run this test in terminal.

$ python -c "import webbrowser"
$ echo $?
0 # webbrowser module exists in system

$ python -c "import bs4"
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named bs4
$ echo $?
1 # bs4 module does not exist in system

To get a list of installed modules without pip, type help("modules") in any python console. To do the same thing using pip, type pip list.


Optimize Image Data

Some content management systems like self-hosted WordPress don't support .heic files. Use this script to convert photos taken on your iPhone to .png

import pillow_heif
from PIL import Image

pillow_heif.register_heif_opener()

img = Image.open("C:/User/Desktop/photo1.heic")
img.save("C:/User/Desktop/photo1.png", format('png'))

The following script strips elif metadata from image files, for improved privacy and security.

image = Image.open("C:/User/Desktop/photo1.png")

data = list(image.getdata())
image_stripped = Image.new(image.mode, image.size)
image_stripped.putdata(data)

image_stripped.save("C:/User/Desktop/photo1.png")
 
image_without_exif.close()

In addition, Optimize Images is a command-line interface (CLI) utility to help you reduce image file sizes and boost page speed and performance.


Hashlib

This module implements a common interface to many different secure hash and message digest algorithms. It's already in the basic anaconda/python install so you don't need to get any new libraries.

URL scraping

This article explains how to scrape search results pages in bulk using python. The author provides an example of scraping hostels data from Hostelworld, but the same workflow can be applied for your specific needs.


One of the most common errors when web scraping is the http 403 forbidden error. This usually happens because the website detects that you are a scraper, and can be resolved by using a fake user agent, implementing session management, or using the time.sleep() function to add a delay between requests. However, if you get an error like Socket exception: Connection reset by peer (104), the website's admin may have blocked you due to some weird or heavy scraping code.


For more on web scraping with python for beginners, see the web scraping section of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

  • It's important to review the website's robots.txt file and terms of service before scraping any website.


R for Digital Marketing

R is a programming language for statistical computing, developed from the earlier version S. It can be expanded with a library of 10,000+ packages, which are add-on features for accomplishing tasks - kind of similar to the vast range of WordPress plugins. This GitHub repository has a good list of R packages for digital marketing so that you can interact with well-loved tools such as Google Analytics, GTM, Search Console, and social media ads.


Tidyverse

When you first install R from CRAN, you will have base R, which includes the necessary machinery to run R on your computer, as well as standard R packages - stats, utils, graphics. Next, download and install tidyverse with the following command.

install.packages("tidyverse")

Tidyverse was born in 2014, and is becoming increasingly mature. It includes the following core packages:

  • readr: read data

  • tidyr: tidy data

  • dplyr: transform data and work on relational databases

  • ggplot2: plot data and create static charts for visualization ※ For rich interactive charts, use htmlwidget instead

.

Working in R is like a spreadsheet, but you interact with it through programming functions instead of keyboard shortcuts or clicking around with your mouse. From automating reports to analyzing A/B tests, R offers a blue ocean of uses for digital marketing.


Structural Equation Modeling

Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) using the lavaan package is a broad topic within the R statistical programming language, building on linear regression described above. One marketing application of SEM is customer survey validation. Survey responses are often interrelated in complex ways, and you can use R to reduce data fields and analyze how those underlying latent variables are related to one another.


Choice Model

Choice models are used to predict the market share for new products. This is an analysis of how customers think about feature prioritization: product, pricing, and ultimately profile design. If the product designer is creating multiple products, they can use the choice model to find the optimal coverage of as many important priorities as possible.


In this workshop by the authors of R for Marketing Research and Analytics, Chris Chapman provides an in-depth example of structural equation modeling in the first half, and Elea McDonnell Feit provides a detailed explanation of choice modeling in the second half.





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