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Sentiments and emotions are hard to quantify, but, ironically, are the most crucial factors when a user makes a purchase decision. Users share their thoughts and opinions across various social platforms day-in-out. To make the most of it, brands need to monitor the chatter and derive useful insights that help understand user emotions, intent, and purpose. After all, every brand wants to know how their target users “feel” about them!

What is Social Sentiment Analysis? 

Marketers are obsessed with metrics, and why not. Metrics help you boost your business in the right direction. However, metrics cannot surpass your users’ sentiments and feelings. 

Social sentiment analysis can help brands dig deep into how their target users “feel” about them and turn social insights into actionable data. When a brand tries to incorporate user perceptions into its marketing and branding strategy, you get a successful and loved brand. 

Social sentiment analysis, or opinion mining, is a natural language processing technique that tells you if the data acquired is positive, negative, or neutral. This enables brands to create a better user experience. After all, it is the end-users experience that matters.

Sentiment Analysis + AI

AI tools are paving the way in every domain we can think of. Whether driving business goals, writing content, or generating customized audio, there is an AI tool for everything. 

It is only obvious that AI found its way into analyzing social sentiments. It pits together the power of two of its subfields – 

• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning

The technology behind sentiment analysis

Any AI-enabled sentiment analysis tool has these two subfields at its core. 

NLP converts human language into a language that machines understand. It implements syntactic (understand text structure) and semantic (identify meaning) techniques. 

Once the text is processed, machine learning algorithms come into play for classifications. Machine learning algorithms help identify patterns in data and make relevant predictions based on them. 

However, you must understand that machine learning algorithms do not rely on explicit instructions. Rather, it learns from its existing data set, i.e., the training data. 

In layman’s terms, a machine learning model will classify texts by sentiments based on the text emotions it is trained on. Each emotion must be labeled with corresponding categories and tags. 

After seeing a few examples, the model learns to associate a given text with a specific tag. Based on this, it starts predicting tags for unseen content. 

Sentiment analysis with AI lets you tag a huge volume of data sets simultaneously and in real-time. Since machine learning algorithms learn over time, your sentiment analysis models will only get smarter. 

Social Sentiment Analysis with AI

Social sentiment analysis tools follow the same model. It scouts social channels to identify and classify texts (social messages) into positive or negative. For instance, a social post stating, “I love using this tool” will give positive results in sentiment analysis.

Check out how sentiment analysis work. 

Featuring: MonkeyLearn’s Free Sentiment Analysis Tool. 

But, is it the same as social listening? 

Social listening vs. social sentiment analysis

While marketers use these two terms interchangeably, they are different. 

Social Listening	Social sentiment analysis
Social listening captures brand mentions across the web.  It is not limited to social channels. Brand mentions can be anywhere – blogs, social channels, forums, communities, etc.  It helps answer questions like –  Where do people talk about my brand? How do they perceive my brand? How does my brand perform against my competitors? Who can be my key influencers?	Social analytics provide actionable insights. It analyzes brand performance on social media at a deeper level and helps you understand the impact of your social efforts.  It helps answer questions like:  How effectively users are engaging on social media? How many people can see your brand? What are the user demographics and interests?

Social sentiment analysis can be tagged as a subset of social listening. Once you discover your brand mentions, the next step is to analyze the sentiment across those mentions. 

This allows brands to detect emergencies and take appropriate action before it is late. After all, more social mentions are not always equal to positive mentions. 

For instance, the eCommerce giant was in hot soup in 2019 for apparently hurting Hindu sentiments when it started showcasing products like doormats, slippers, and toilet seat covers with pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses. A Twitter user posted images of the same and was backed by thousands of people urging the brand to remove the entire catalog. 

The aggression was severe, to the point where users threatened to stop using the app or delete the app, altogether! And why not. It was the second time Amazon made the same mistake. 

As a result, Amazon clarified that the said product catalogs are removed and that all sellers will adhere to the selling guidelines. If sellers do not adhere to the selling guidelines, their products will be removed from the eCommerce portal. 

Owing up social backlash with utmost honesty and rectifying mistakes – brands can do it right if they successfully listen to their users and analyze the sentiment around the chatter. 

Types of Social Sentiment Analysis

Opinions (or sentiments) on social media are wide-ranged. They can be extremely positive or negative, somewhat positive or negative, or absolutely neutral. This is also termed as polarity-driven analysis. 

Here’s how you can grade emotions from the tone of the text. 

User opinion	Sentiment analysis
I am so stocked to see this feature live. Can’t wait to try it out	Extreme positive
Why would you remove the icon @xyz brand?	Somewhat negative
I am never coming back to this website ever, ever again. Pathetic customer service.	Extreme negative
Not sure if this feature will help marketers in the long run	Neutral
I love buying from @xyz but this time you’ve really goofed up	Somewhat negative

Sentiment analysis models

Grading sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral is the first level. To implement AI-enabled social sentiment analysis, you must go beyond polarity. 

Some advanced and popular types of sentiment analysis include: 

• Emotion analysis

Emotion-driven analysis helps you dig deeper into user emotions like anger, happiness, or frustration around your product/brand. In most cases, sentiment analysis tools use lexicons i.e. list of words that conveys emotions, or resort to advanced machine learning algorithms. 

The downside of using lexicons is that the correct emotion is often not captured. Lexicons contain words that specify a certain kind of emotion. For instance, words like bad or kill often resonates with anger. However, a social opinion stating this feature is killing it indicates happiness. 

For instance, look at this tweet with all the bad words, but the tweet’s emotion is positive and happy. In such cases, the emotion analysis can go wrong unless your sentiment analysis also considers the emojis. 

In that case, the algorithm will predict the emotion correctly. 

• Aspect-based analysis

Aspect-based analysis helps brands understand what exact feature or part of ad users tag as good, bad, or ugly!

For instance, This filter does not look good on nigh-mode pictures instantly tells a brand that the opinion is solely about the said filter. The brand can improve the filter or launch a new one for the camera’s night mode. Either way, aspect-based analysis helps dig deep into what users want and what they do not. 

• Multilingual sentiments

This involves a lot of pre-processing and resources. You will need lexicons (available online), noise, and translation algorithms (you must build them) to detect the sentiment. 

Multilingual sentiment analysis works for brands with users from varied ethnicities, cultures, and demographics. 

Social sentiment analysis to Understand Customers

There is no other alternative for brands but to listen to and understand their end-users. As more and more users become aware of the power of social media and brand positioning, brands must leverage social monitoring and sentiment analysis. 

Here’s how you can use sentiment analysis to your benefit. 

1. Spot opportunities to improve user experience

When you start monitoring brand mentions across social channels (and the web), you monitor compliments and complaints. This gives you a detailed insight into what your users expect from you. While compliments show that your product/services are built in the right direction, complaints show the gap that you might be missing otherwise. 

For instance, a complaint need not be aggressive or extremely negative. It can also be around a missing feature or service you have not yet introduced. Monitoring such mentions and engaging with users can help you identify what your users seek. If you find most users voting for that missing feature, you know it’s time to get it done. 

One brand that I absolutely love using is Canva, not only because the templates and design possibilities help marketers like me design pro images – but also because this brand listens and responds. 

Check this tweet from one of its users and how Canva handled it. 

There are many instances when you feel like a feature is missing and validate the same via social media. Social posts like these are also part of sentiment analysis. The score may not be as high as a proper negative review, but it will still be graded as negative. 

Pro-tip to handle such mentions: Own up to the gap and be empathetic. This lets the user know you’ve noted the issue and will work around it. It builds trust and also improves user experience. When a user knows he/she is heard, that’s all that matters to build a healthy brand reputation. 

2. Reduce customer wait time

Sentiment analysis tools will show you sentiments over time, like days, weeks, and months. Simultaneously, it will also tag social posts as positive, negative, and neutral for you to take quick action. 

For instance, I used a free sentiment analyzer tool to review the sentiment score for a random post. 

The tool analyzed the text and scored -100, indicating extremely negative and serious issues. The post uses a sarcastic tone to complain, but the tool accurately captures the negative sentiment. 

Similarly, I used one of the genuine tweets from Canva’s Twitter channel and ran an analysis on the same – 

While this tweet is regarding a missing feature in the product, the sentiment is still positive and generates a 100 score on the sentiment scorecard. It contains lexicons like ‘not sure’, which can easily get tagged as negative sentiments. However, looking at the context, the tool marks it as positive. 

In both cases, you must be quick to respond. 

• Responding to a positive or neutral social post will help you build better relationships with your users, along with instant gratification. 
• Responding to an issue or complaint on social media posts with either a solution or a process/resource to resolve the issue quickly can help you build user retention. 

No one wants to wait endlessly. Forget endless; users hate to wait beyond an hour. Research shows users expect a reply within 24 hours. Your users will start rethinking your brand within seconds of encountering an issue. So, the quicker you are, the better it is. 

For instance, Apple’s customer support is always prompt in its reply. While it does not fully resolve the issue immediately, the response time is less than a minute which is a breather for any users stuck with an issue. The response contains either some general steps to resolve the issue or a quick message to DM them the issue using the send us a private message CTA included in the response. [Tweet] 

What I love about this social handle is that every response (although these are automated) has customization. For example, the user complains about iMessage, so the response includes the ‘iMessage’ term to give it a personal touch. 

Pro-tip to reduce wait time: The best way to reduce wait time is by automating tas tagging for incoming support tickets. 

You can train your customer support team to use sentiment analysis to tag incoming tickets and automatically put negative tickets at the top of the queue. 

Simultaneously, you can create rules to automatically get negative tickets assigned to the most experienced representative to guarantee the best attention. 

3. Define Neutral and Emojis for accurate analysis

Defining positive and negative is easier than defining neutral. It is hard to train your machine-learning model to detect neutral tags. 

How you perceive neutral plays an important role in training your sentiment analysis model. Each tagging data will require tagging criteria so that a good definition can go a long way. Here’s how you can do this: 

1. Classify all objective texts as neutral, especially those that do not have explicit sentiments. 
2. If your data is still pre-processed, you can tag it neutral since the irrelevant data is yet to be filtered. But do it with caution. Sometimes, it may add more noise and hamper the performance. 
3. Texts like “I wish it could do XYZ” are usually neutral. However, you may find it harder to categorize wish texts like “I wish xyz did better than abc”. 

Next comes categorizing emojis. Emojis are of two types: 

• Western emojis with two characters
• Easter emojis with longer combinations of characters of vertical nature

Emojis play a pivotal role in determining the sentiment of the texts, especially in tweets. 

In this case, you must be careful of character and word levels when performing sentiment analysis. 

Pro Tip: Consider pre-processing social media content, transforming emojis into tokens, and whitelisting them. 

How to do social sentiment analysis [Use Case: Twitter]

Twitter offers instant gratification, which makes it the most accurate blueprint of user opinion. Monitoring brand mentions and competitor mentions can help in understanding the ‘emotion’ of users, how they feel about a product or a particular feature, and what can trigger them incorrectly. 

Twitter sentiment analysis can be done using programming languages like R and Python. Below are the steps for Twitter data sentiment analysis. 

1. Extract and collect data

To mine data from Twitter, you can use Twitter APIs like Tweepy and TextBlob. Data extraction is the crux of the process because all other steps directly depend on this. 

Ensure that your Twitter data contains the observations you want to analyze. You will find two types of tweets: 

• Latest tweets under real-time hashtags, keywords, or topics. 
• Historical tweets posted in the past and their responses in different timelines. 

2. Pre-process sentiment analysis dataset

Tweets are mostly unstructured data and require extensive pre-processing before using them as training data for the sentiment analysis model. Data reduction is one way of preparing data for mining. 

This includes: 

• Cleaning all the noise from the data
• Deleting duplicate or meaningless tweets [eg, tweets shorter than three characters]
• Formatting improvements and concatenation
• Preparing custom data to perform testing on the model

Clean and good data facilitates precise outcomes, i.e. more accurate predictions.

3. Build an ML model for sentiment analysis

The model building depends on the problem statement, requirements, and use cases. However, it has 5 mandates –

1. Create the base model type as a Classifier to categorize and define tags
2. Under the model, create a sentiment analysis project for the classification
3. Import the pre-processed data as the training dataset for model
4. Train the model by tagging each tweet as positive, negative, or neutral. After a few manual tagging, the models learn to do the tagging with maximum accuracy. 
5. Test the model performance and preciseness of predictions. The larger dataset you use, the easier it is for the model to learn the tagging. 

Tip for maximum accuracy: Define tags more explicitly in the training data and crosscheck for false positives and negatives using various test cases. 

4. Analyse the data for sentiment analysis

Integrate Twitter data with the tweet sentiment analysis model. There are pre-built APIs that require tokenization and API calls to complete the integration process. 

Examples: Inference API by Huggice Face, Lexanalytics, Brandwatch, Rosette, Social Mention, and more. 

5. Use data visualization to demonstrate your findings

Data visualization illustrates any sentiment analysis report the best. It is easy to understand, interactive, and dynamic. In addition, they work on business intelligence frameworks and render impeccable data visuals. 

Examples: Power BI, Google Data Studio, Tableau, Klipfolio, etc. 

Closing statement

Social sentiment analysis has proven benefits like – 

1. Large-scale data sorting
2. Real-time data analysis
3. Improved user experience
4. Detailed competitor analysis

It can be applied to innumerable aspects of your business – be it brand monitoring, product analytics, market research, and customer service. Social sentiment analysis helps brands work fast and work smartly. It works towards listening to users more accurately and making the end-user experience worthwhile. 

Sentiment analysis is already mandated for brands who want to build products or design services catered to humans. It gives a deeper insight into user intent, emotions, and engagements for teams to work more effectively. 

Have you started analyzing your users’ emotions across social channels?

Featured image by Luis Quintero on Pexels

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In today’s digital age, designing for accessibility is more important than ever. With over a billion people living with some form of disability, it’s crucial to ensure that websites and digital products are accessible to everyone. 

Designing for accessibility is not only the right thing to do, it’s also good for business. By creating a website that is accessible to all users, you can reach a wider audience and improve the user experience for everyone. So whether you’re designing a new website or updating an existing one, make sure to prioritize accessibility in your design process.

Some giants, like H&M, PayPal, or Linkedin, are introducing one feature to boost accessibility after another, hoping the strike the AAA score (the highest level of accessibility). And similar to how we follow these brands in terms of design and tendencies, here it’s even wiser to follow their example. So in this article, we’ll explore some tips and best practices for designing for accessibility.

Make your website or digital product keyboard accessible

Not all users can use a mouse, so it’s essential to make sure your website or digital product can be navigated using a keyboard. Keyboard navigation is crucial for users with motor disabilities, and it’s also helpful for users who prefer to navigate uniquely using their keyboard.

Keyboard navigation can be implemented by ensuring that all interactive elements can be accessed via the Tab key. Users should be able to navigate through links, buttons, and form fields using this way. Additionally, check that your website or digital product has clear visual focus indicators to help users understand where they are on the page.

Use proper color contrast

Many users with visual impairments have trouble distinguishing between colors, so the proper color contrast in your design really matters. This means using a combination of colors that are easy to distinguish and have a high level of contrast.

One way to obtain proper color contrast is to use a tool like WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker. It allows you to check the contrast ratio of two colors and make sure they meet accessibility standards. WCAG 2.1 AA requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.

Use alt tags for images

Images on a website or digital product are often meaningless for users with visual impairments. That’s why it’s important to use alt tags for images, which provide a text description of the image. Screen readers can read the alt tags aloud, allowing users to understand the content.

When writing alt tags, do your best to be descriptive and provide as much detail as possible. Avoid using phrases like “image of” or “picture of,” as these don’t give much information. Instead, describe what’s in the image and what it conveys.

Make your content easy to read

Readable content is essential for all users, but it’s especially important for users with cognitive or learning disabilities. That’s why you are recommended to use a font that is easy to read, with a large enough size and appropriate line spacing. Additionally, avoid using long paragraphs and use headings and bullet points to break up the content.

The font you choose should be easy to read and not too stylized. Sans serif fonts like Arial and Verdana are a good choice, as they are clean and easy to read. Avoid using decorative fonts, as they can be hard to read, especially for users with dyslexia.

Headings and bullet points are a great way to structurize your content and make it more scannable. Make the headings clear and descriptive so they help users understand the structure of the content. Also, ensure the bullet points present information clearly and concisely.

Ensure your website is compatible with assistive technology

Many users with disabilities rely on assistive technology, e.g., screen readers or speech recognition software, to navigate websites and digital services. 

The easiest way to ensure compatibility with assistive technology is by using semantic HTML. Semantic HTML uses tags to convey the meaning of the content, making it easier for screen readers to understand. 

We’ve talked with The Designest team, who runs a blog for the professional design community, and asked what they find crucial for website accessibility. Here are some tips and best practices they suggest:

1. Provide alternative text for images. Screen readers and other assistive technologies rely on alt text to describe images to users who cannot see them. Make sure to provide alt text for all images on your website.
2. Use clear and concise language. Let it be plain and avoid jargon or complex sentences/words that may be difficult for some users to understand.
3. Ensure that all interactive elements, like buttons and links, are keyboard-accessible. Users should be able to navigate and interact with your website using only their keyboard. 
4. Provide clear and consistent navigation. That’s how the users can easily find what they are searching for. 
5. Use color with care. It’s important to ensure it remains accessible to users with difficulty perceiving certain hues. Use a high-contrast color scheme and avoid relying solely on color to convey information.
6. Test your website with assistive technologies. 

In addition to the recommendations above, designers can do several other things to make their websites and digital products more accessible.

Use of multimedia

Videos and audio content can be particularly challenging for users with hearing impairments. To make multimedia content more accessible, consider adding closed captioning and transcripts for videos and audio content. Closed captioning provides a text version of the audio content, while transcripts provide a written version. 

Web forms on websites

Web forms can be particularly challenging for users with visual impairments, motor disabilities, and cognitive or learning disabilities. To make them more accessible, ensure they are easy to navigate using a keyboard and provide clear and concise instructions for each field. Additionally, you might consider using labels and placeholders to provide context for each field.

Featured image by Elizabeth Woolner on Unsplash

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The internet is vast, full of potential …and dangerous. As the world becomes more dependent on digital activity, hacks and breaches are becoming more common.

Even elite cybersecurity firms aren’t immune to the risks. In 2022, the popular password manager LastPass reported that cybercriminals had broken into its password vaults and stolen encrypted data, leaving customers unsettled and worried.

As 2023 gains momentum, business owners must be on guard to protect both themselves and their clientele from this growing threat. One of the best ways they can do so is through multi-factor authentication.

What Is Multi-Factor Authentication?

The LastPass data breach serves as a reminder that the digital world is always evolving — and business leaders and customers alike must evolve with it if they want to stay secure. Multifactor Authentication (MFA) offers an effective way to complicate the hacking process by using more than one level of security depending on the situation.

For instance, the data security experts at Okta explain that MFA “blends at least two separate factors.” The identity provider details that one of these factors is usually a username and password — but that on its own is no longer enough.

MFA adds an additional level of security. This could be a physical possession, like a phone or keycard. It could also be a physical location based on GPS. In situations where more safety is desired, it could also include a personal identifier like a fingerprint or iris scan.

Multi-factor authentication can feel like a hassle on the surface. However, in many cases, it can actually have a positive impact on the speed of logging in. In fact, the simple act of adding another step to the login process can provide a slew of other worthwhile benefits to businesses and customers alike.

The Benefits of MFA in Business Transactions

MFA takes some time to implement — but that is true with any defense system. Even Medieval castles expanded the building time of a home to as much as a decade, all in the name of creating an elite defense system for something that had value.

If you’re hesitating over whether MFA is worth it, here are a few of the major benefits to consider for both you and your business.

MFA Provides Peace of Mind

One of the most obvious benefits of multi-factor authentication is that it provides peace of mind. 

Businesses are in a constant race to take advantage of technological solutions to give them an edge over the competition. The ability to aggressively invest in digital software and applications without worrying about compromising on security is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.

MFA Means Less Long-Term Clean-Up Work

According to research reported by the University of North Georgia, 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses. The odds of facing a web-based attack, a phishing scam, or another attempt to hack your system are serious and significant.

Proactively establishing better security for your business means you’re putting a little work in early. However, once MFA is in place, you’re also avoiding the need to spend a significant amount of time, energy, and resources later on when a likely attack would have taken place.

MFA Is an Adaptable Security Solution

The world was already shifting to a decentralized office before the pandemic exponentially sped up the evolution of the workplace. In the wake of the crisis, offices are shifting to a combination of in-person, hybrid, and fully remote workplace settings. Sometimes all three of these are present within a single workforce.

With so much in flux (and many workers trying to access company software remotely), the complexity of security is changing. MFA is a strong and adaptable solution that can meet the security needs of this new workforce.

MFA Is User-Friendly

No one likes memorizing passwords (or resetting them when they forget). With that in mind, the thought of creating an even more complex cybersecurity network can sound daunting — but it isn’t.

In fact, MFA removes much of the need for passwords. Instead, things like physical locations and facial recognition can serve in their place. This makes it easier to create strong authentication processes that are still user-friendly (for employees and customers alike).

MFA Enhances Customer Trust

From peace of mind to adaptability, MFA has many direct and applicable advantages for a business. In addition, its user-friendly nature is a boon to both employees and customers.

Another area where customers come out on top is the trust and loyalty that MFA can create. When a customer knows that a business is going above and beyond to create a safe environment for them, it can help them feel safe and secure as they interact with you. 

As far as your business is concerned, fostering customer trust translates to things like loyalty, repeat business, and word-of-mouth advertising — all of which positively impact revenue.

MFA Is the Future of Cybersecurity

Individual complex and nuanced security solutions are useful for a while. Eventually, though, cybercriminals figure things out.

MFA deploys an organic, impossible-to-overcome complexity to the security process: layers. By complicating a username and password with additional biometric, geographic, and possession-based factors, it naturally creates a level of security that can let business owners, employees, and customers alike operate in peace, no matter what ups and downs the digital future may hold.

Featured Image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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While a project plan can give project managers more profound insights into a project, measuring its progress keeps it going in the right direction. 

Monitoring a project from a close distance can yield timely and high-quality results and keep Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), like team progress, budget overruns, and obstacles, in check. To understand the term better, let’s talk more about project progress. 

What Is Project Progress Tracking?

Project progress tracking, also referred to as collecting actuals, is a project management method that’s used to follow the progress of tasks in a project. 

It indicates the actions that project managers take regularly to observe the work going on in a project so that desired results are obtained. This action involves the following-

• Building project status reports from the project tracking systems in use
• Monitoring resources that were used at any point during the project
• Cross-checking the completion of tasks and their dependencies according to the project timeline
• Regular meetings with teams and stakeholders
• Tracking project time to keep track of time spent on the project

In the beginning, team members may not be comfortable with you asking them regularly about their actions. Yet, project managers must drive motivation while also being sensitive to team concerns to always receive accurate information. 

Challenges in Measuring Project Progress

Team resistance may be one of the challenges that project managers will come across while tracking project progress. But there’s more to be prepared for. Below are some of the most common hurdles that are faced by project managers.

1. Inadequate Risk Analysis 

This is a vital segment of a project lifecycle as it can foretell potential factors that can jeopardize a project’s timeline. However, risk analysis comes with its vulnerabilities, which can result in flaws in the project plan. For instance, if the analysis is rushed at some point in the project, it could result in monetary issues or failure in the overall project plan.

Tip: Improve risk analysis strategies by researching potential issues that your team might encounter while also devising control measures to prevent them. Also, make sure you have access to real-time data.

2. Communication Gaps

Are you effectively communicating with your team and stakeholders? If not, then it’s high time to start doing so. Without communication, getting an accurate portrayal of a project’s progress can be hard. 

Communication skills, verbal or written, can assist project managers in instructing team members more effectively and relaying any gathered information to the stakeholders. 

Tip: Having a robust project management tool can help you with proper reporting communication. Such tools can make sense of all the data and send scheduled reports to the required stakeholders in the format they need. Also, project managers must remember to adjust their communication methods to adjust different communication styles.

3. Vague Goals or Criteria 

Most projects fail because they never started with a clear purpose. If you want your projects to be successful then you should have clear and measurable goals to work towards. Imagine what an endless road trip you’d have if you did not know your destination. It’s the same for a project without a goal. 

Tip: Define your project’s KPIs as well as the timeline before the implementation phase to have clearer goals.

4. The Danger of Scope Creep 

When a project starts, changes might crop up in the deliverables or goals of a project, which may deviate its focus from the original plan. This can affect the project outcome. Some common instances of scope creep are as follows.:

• Changes in the number of deliverables
• Increase in the number of features required in a project
• Changes in client’s needs
• Instances where the client asks for incorrect deliverables
• A change of the project’s end goal by the stakeholder 

5. Resistance

The project manager will not always be the line manager for all resources and there might be some resistance from teams when tasks are tracked. To avoid this, it’s important to prepare them for the idea of project progress measurements right from the start. This can be done by explaining how it can help them streamline their activities. 

Once teams are aware that their progress will be measured from time to time to make things easier for them, you’ll surely receive the most accurate estimates from them.

How to Measure Project Progress Effectively 

Project managers must keep a few simple tips in mind to help them successfully observe a project’s progress. This must also be conveyed to the concerned team managing the projects from the start to the end making the information exchange easier throughout the project.

Having said that here are some tips that can aid in measuring a project’s progress effectively for the successful completion of tasks:

1. Choose the Right Methods for Project Tracking

Project progress tracking methods can either be quantitative or qualitative. While the former focuses on metrics like any turning point in a project, the costs, and the time, the latter concentrates on data and information from team meetings. Both methods are different but ensure great results.

The quantitative variables may include tracking of time, costs, etc. which gives objective data points to work with. The qualitative tracking could include regular check-ins with the team to analyze the ‘WHY’ behind the data to deal with any issues.

2. Build Project Status Reports 

It’s wise to begin projects by deducing information that would be useful for measuring a project’s progress and understanding its usefulness for someone else. 

Status reports aim at providing an overview of all activities happening in a project as well as the reason for the activities. That is why status reports have to be easily understandable so that team members can make decisions on how to proceed with the project.

Tip: Making reports manually may seem like a standard but for accurate progress tracking, it’s always better to have data in real-time and avoid working in silos. Also, too much data never help so make sure you have a reporting system that’s comprehensive but can be easily customized as well.

3. Recognize the Project Goals and Adhere to Them

Knowing your project goals is key to tracking your performance. Your team must also be informed of the same to be able to deliver the target objective. Have a SMART goal in place to deal with this. Such goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, meaning that you can easily track the goals vs. progress of a project in tangible terms.

Once your goals meet the criteria mentioned above, you can get your team members in on the plan as well and ensure that they stick to them.

Tip: Ensure you have a system in place to have a complete view of estimates vs. actuals. This should include data on the management of all assets that are contributing to the project, especially human resources.

4. Always Use Checklists

Having an inventory right in front of your eyes aids project managers in breaking down tasks into phases like

• client onboarding 
• project ideation and planning 
• execution
• submission
• final review & edits 

Each of these phases can further be divided into actionable tasks that can be further allocated to different team members. 

5. Keep Stakeholders in the Loop

Always share your project progress with all relevant stakeholders. This makes you, the project manager, responsible, and stakeholders aware of issues that might arise during the project. 

Stakeholders will know what to expect upon project completion, and project managers will have more options to assess the costs involved and project timelines in real time if required.

6. Let Communication Always Be Constructive

If you aren’t able to communicate effectively with your team then it may not be possible to provide stakeholders with correct information about the overall progress of the project. 

Remember to always keep all communication channels transparent and clear, not overburdening your team members in the process. Constructive communication encourages efficient data exchange in a simpler form so that everyone gets at least a gist of the project’s progress. 

Guarantee Project Success With Progress Tracking

Tracking project progress might not seem important at first, but the truth is that it’s critical in determining the success or failure of a project. For this, many project tracking software is available for project managers to leverage and efficiently manage projects on an intuitive and flexible platform. 

Does it look like your project is not going as planned and diverting from the plan of action? If your answer is yes, then it’s time for you to start reaping the benefits of project progress tracking today.

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Choosing the best proxy service provider is complex. Luckily, we’ve made it easy by scouring the market and bringing you the best proxy providers.

Have you ever bought proxies from the wrong provider? I wasted my time and money. Trust me, I’ve been there before, and I can tell you how frustrating and exhausting it can be.

If you’ve never experienced it, you know that hearing it is better than experiencing it. With the help of our proxy experts, you will never fall for the wrong proxy provider again as long as you follow all the guides in this article until later.

That’s why we’ve researched and scoured the market to find the best proxy providers. Our recommendations apply to all consumer, mobile, and data center proxy categories proxies. Whatever business you need proxies for, you will get the most out of this article. If you’re looking for the best residential proxies providers, you can check out this compilation of the best residential proxies.

What Are Proxy Services?

A proxy service is a server or computer program that acts as a go-between for a user’s device and the Internet. It enables users to access websites and other online resources without disclosing their IP address, location, or other identifying information.

Proxy services intercept and forward Internet traffic between your device and the website you wish to visit. The website sees the proxy’s IP address rather than the user’s, preserving user privacy and anonymity.

Top 8 Proxy Services for Data Collection in 2023

We thoroughly researched and evaluated around 70 proxy services to develop the top 8 recommendations based on our comprehensive analysis.

Crawlbase

Crawlbase’’s Smart Proxy API is a web scraping and knowledge extraction tool that allows you to get data at scale while utilizing the latest algorithms, services, and infrastructure customizable as per your data extraction needs.

Crawlbase’s Smart Proxy uses a distributed structure that enables it to scrape websites at scale, ensuring it does not get blocked with anti-scraping measures. It has a gigantic rotating ip address pool that it manages on it’s end in order to enable users to avoid IP blocking during CAPTCHA challenges.
Moreover, it presents integrations with standard knowledge evaluation instruments like Google Sheets, Excel, and SQL databases, making importing the extracted data into different techniques effortless with its API.

Features of Crawlbase
Crawlbase is an internet scraping and data extraction tool that offers the following features:

• Crawlbase provides web crawling services to gather data from websites, including dynamic and JavaScript-heavy sites.
• Crawlbase provides residential and data center proxies
• Crawlbase allows users to extract HTML, JSON, and XML data.
• Crawlbase has built-in data cleansing and transformation tools to extract standardized data easily.
• Crawlbase incorporates 3rd party APIs and databases to provide information such as geolocation, sentiment analysis, and social media metrics.
• Crawlbase allows users to schedule crawling and data extraction concurrently.
• Crawlbase provides real-time data regarding APIs, webhooks, and cloud storage services.
• Crawlbase proxy management prevents blocking by websites
• Crawlbase can easily handle large-scale data scraping, including processing and analyzing huge data sets

Bright Data

Bright Data offers an online data gathering and analysis platform for organizations to access and gather publically available data at scale. The platform leverages a P2P network of more than 72 million residential IP addresses and more than 2 million mobile proxies to collect data from practically any country and device.

The platform also offers data validation, cleaning, and integration options to guarantee quality and accuracy. Fortune 500 organizations, e-commerce enterprises, and startups in retail, finance, travel, and healthcare sectors make up Bright Data’s clientele. With offices in the US and the UK, Bright Data has its main headquarter in Israel.

Features of Bright Data

Bright Data is a platform for web data extraction that enables companies to get information from the Internet. Bright Data has several features:

• Over 72 million residential and mobile proxies comprise the platform’s extensive network in more than 200 nations and territories.
• Bright Data is compatible with various applications and programming languages.
• Users can collect data from various sources, including e-commerce sites, social media platforms, and news sites.
• Bright Data offers automated data extraction tools for efficient and quick data extraction.
• The platform provides tools for data quality control and compliance with data privacy.
• Customer support is available through email, phone, and live chat.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs offers businesses access to a global network of proxies for web scraping and provides a range of solutions for automating data collection and analysis processes.

Its services include data scraping and extraction, data parsing and cleaning, data enrichment, schedule-based crawling, customized solutions, proxy management, and data security and privacy. Oxylabs offers a user-friendly interface and flexible pricing plans, and its proprietary residential proxy pool ensures anonymity and avoids detection by websites.

Features of Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a web scraping and proxy service provider that offers the following features:

• With over 195 locations worldwide and over 100 million residential and data center proxies, Oxylabs has a sizable proxy network.
• A huge proxy network exists at Oxylabs. Real-time data transmission provides immediate access via APIs and webhooks
• Data scraping and extraction services to gather data from various sources such as HTML, JSON, and XML formats
• Users can clean and organize extracted data using the built-in data cleaning and parsing tools.
• Capability to handle large-scale data extraction projects, including processing and analyzing big data sets
• Adherence to best data security and privacy standards, such as SSL encryption, password protection, and data encryption.

Smartproxy

Smartproxy is a web scraping and proxy service provider enabling businesses to access a global network of residential and data center proxies for data collection. The services offered by Smartproxy include data scraping, extraction, parsing, cleaning, enrichment, schedule-based crawling, proxy management, and data security and privacy.

Smartproxy provides a user-friendly interface and flexible pricing plans for businesses of all sizes. One of the unique features of Smartproxy is its ability to provide session control to maintain the same IP address for the duration of a session, ensuring consistency and reliability in data collection.

Features of Smartproxy

• With more than 40 million residential and data center proxies in more than 195 locations worldwide, Smartproxy offers a sizable proxy network.
• Real-time data delivery through APIs and webhooks is available.
• Smartproxy supports data scraping and extraction from various sources
• Built-in data parsing and cleaning tools in parsing and cleaning extracted data.
• Supports schedule-based crawling, allowing users to specify a recurring schedule for crawling and data extraction.
• Smartproxy can handle large-scale web scraping and data extraction projects
• Smartproxy follows data security and privacy best practices, including data encryption, password protection, and SSL encryption, to ensure secure data transmission.

Netnut

NetNut provides web scraping and proxy services to businesses, allowing them to collect data from the web using a global network of residential and data center proxies.

It offers solutions to bypass IP blocking and access data undetected, with services including data scraping, extraction, parsing, cleaning, enrichment, schedule-based crawling, customized solutions, proxy management, and data security and privacy.
NetNut’s services are usually designed for businesses of all sizes and feature a user-friendly interface and flexible pricing plans. The unique feature of NetNut is its ability to provide static residential IPs, which are ideal for activities requiring persistent identification.

Features of NetNut

• NetNut has an extensive proxy network with over 10 million residential and data center proxies
• Real-time data delivery through APIs and webhooks
• Built-in data parsing and cleaning tools to help users parse and clean the extracted data
• Allows users to integrate with third-party APIs and databases to provide information
• Supports schedule-based crawling for recurring data extraction
• Can handle large-scale web scraping and data extraction projects
• Follows data security and privacy best practices, including encryption, password protection, and SSL encryption

Proxy Cheap

Businesses that use Proxy-Cheap’s scraping and proxy services have access to a massive network of residential and datacenter proxies for data collection.

With services including data scraping, extraction, parsing, cleaning, enrichment, schedule-based crawling, tailored solutions, proxy administration, and data security and privacy, Proxy-Cheap assists organizations in automating data collecting and analysis operations.
It offers ways to overcome IP restrictions and access data from numerous websites unnoticeably. The services offered by Proxy-Cheap have a user-friendly interface and numerous price options and are suitable for companies of all sizes.

Features of Proxy-Cheap

Proxy-Cheap is a web scraping and proxy service provider that offers a range of features to help businesses to collect data from the web. Some of the critical features of Proxy-Cheap include the following:

• Proxy-Cheap provides web scraping and proxy services to businesses for data collection and analysis.
• Proxy-Cheap has an extensive proxy network with over 6 million residential and datacenter.
• Real-time data delivery is possible through APIs and webhooks.
• Data scraping and extraction supports HTML, JSON, and XML formats.
• Schedule-based crawling is available for recurring data extraction.
• Supports large-scale web scraping and data extraction projects.
• Advanced proxy management often routes web scraping requests through different IP addresses.

Shifter

The Shifter is a platform for web scraping and automation that allows businesses to collect and analyze data from the web without coding experience. It supports data extraction from various sources and provides built-in data parsing and cleaning tools.

Users can enrich the extracted data by integrating it with third-party APIs and databases. Shifter offers advanced features like browser automation and JavaScript execution to scrape dynamic and interactive websites. Its services specifically automate data collection and analysis processes to make informed decisions.

Features of Shifter

• 7Shifter is a platform for web scraping and automation.
• It allows businesses to collect and analyze data from the web without coding experience.
• Shifter supports data extraction from various sources and provides built-in data parsing and cleaning tools.
• Users can use third-party APIs and databases to enrich the extracted data.
• Use services to automate data collection and analysis processes to make informed decisions.

Proxyrack

A huge network of residential and data center proxies is available to enterprises through Proxyrack, a web scraping and proxy service provider. Its products assist organizations in automating data collecting and analysis procedures and making wise judgments.

Data enrichment, schedule-based crawling, bespoke solutions, proxy administration, data scraping, parsing, and cleaning are all services provided by Proxyrack in addition to data protection and privacy.

Features of Proxyrack

• 2M+ residential and data center proxies in 140+ locations across the globe
• Distribution of real-time data is feasible by APIs and webhooks.
• Integrating third-party databases and APIs for the enrichment of data.
• Advanced proxy management allows requests routed across many IPs to evade detection.
• Best data security and privacy standards to follow, including SSL transmission and encryption.

Conclusion

The above article emphasizes the importance of considering reliability, security, speed, and geolocation capabilities when selecting a data-collection proxy service. Some top proxy services may offer advanced features like automatic IP address rotation, data center proxies, and mobile proxies. These can help users collect data efficiently while avoiding detection or blocking by websites.

In addition to technical considerations, it is essential to ensure that using proxy services for data collection is legal and ethical. Some websites and platforms prohibit using proxy servers, and users should avoid violating any terms of service or user agreements.

Overall, by carefully evaluating options and choosing a reliable and secure proxy service, users can effectively collect data for their needs while maintaining ethical and legal standards.

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