Marketing scholars increasingly use web scraping and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to collect data from the internet. Yet, despite the widespread use of such web data, the idiosyncratic and sometimes insidious challenges in its collection have received limited attention. How can researchers ensure that the datasets generated via web scraping and APIs are valid? While existing resources emphasize technical details of extracting web data, the authors propose a novel methodological framework focused on enhancing its validity. In particular, the framework highlights how addressing validity concerns requires the joint consideration of idiosyncratic technical and legal/ethical questions along the three stages of collecting web data: selecting data sources, designing the data collection, and extracting the data. The authors further review more than 300 articles using web data published in the top five marketing journals and offer a typology of how web data has advanced marketing thought. The article concludes with directions for future research to identify promising web data sources and to embrace novel approaches for using web data to capture and describe evolving marketplace realities.

营销学者越来越多地使用网络抓取和应用程序编程接口 (API) 从互联网收集数据。然而，尽管此类网络数据得到广泛使用，但其收集过程中的特殊且有时是阴险的挑战却受到了有限的关注。研究人员如何确保通过网络抓取和 API 生成的数据集是有效的？虽然现有资源强调提取网络数据的技术细节，但作者提出了一种新的方法框架，专注于提高其有效性。特别是，该框架强调了如何解决有效性问题需要在收集网络数据的三个阶段共同考虑特殊的技术和法律/伦理问题：选择数据源、设计数据收集和提取数据。作者使用发表在前五名营销期刊上的网络数据进一步审查了 300 多篇文章，并提供了网络数据如何推动营销思想的类型学。本文最后介绍了未来研究的方向，以确定有前景的网络数据源，并采用新的方法来使用网络数据来捕捉和描述不断变化的市场现实。