Web data scraping for digital public relations analysis based on the example of companies installing photovoltaic systems

Purpose: The first objective of this article was an attempt at identifying the major differences between such terms as public relations (PR), digital public relations (DPR) and digital marketing (DM). The second objective was to employ selected web data scraping techniques to analyse DPR of service providers installing photovoltaic systems. Design/methodology/approach: The first objective of this article was achieved by analysing reference works. To achieve the second objective, the author used MS Excel, web scraping and proprietary computer scripts in R and Python. In this way, selected details were obtained from the companies catalogue at panoramafirm.pl and Google search engine, and then the received results were compared and analysed. What is more, the results from Google search engine were obtained and analysed for 964 towns and cities entered in the engine with the “photovoltaics” phrase. Findings: 50 thousand URLs were obtained and 1,755 unique website domain addresses were extracted. Analysing the content of websites at the obtained Internet domains, 6 major categories of websites were identified, which appeared in the first 10 search results for the photovoltaic-related queries. These are: Company Websites (CW), Blog Websites (BW), Announcement Services (AS), SEO Landing Pages (SLP), Public Announcement Pages (PAP) and Social Media Page (SMP). Each of these categories is characterised briefly and a few examples are provided for each of them. Research limitations/implications: The limitations of this article include the focus on one companies catalogue, i.e., panoramafirm.pl, and the results from Google search engine solely for the Polish language. Moreover, only the results of the first 10 links from Google engine for the single “photovoltaics” phrase and town/city name were taken into consideration. Originality/value: This article has a theoretical and practical value. The analysis allowed to identify six categories of websites, which may be analysed with respect to digital public relations in the area of photovoltaic system installation. The most important of them are the websites belonging to the Company Website (CW) and Social Media Page (SMP) types. This article is addressed to anyone interested in obtaining data from the Internet using web scraping technique and data analysis in the area of digital public relations (DPR).