In today’s competitive world everybody is looking for ways to innovate and make use of new technologies. Web scraping (also called web data extraction or data scraping) provides a solution for those who want to get access to structured web data in an automated fashion. Web scraping is useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn’t have an API, or it does, but provides only limited access to the data.
In this article, we are going to shed some light on web scraping, here’s what you will learn:
And it should not be surprising because web scraping provides something really valuable that nothing else can: it gives you structured web data from any public website.
More than a modern convenience, the true power of web scraping lies in its ability to build and power some of the world’s most revolutionary business applications. ‘Transformative’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way some companies use web scraped data to enhance their operations, informing executive decisions all the way down to individual customer service experiences.
This is what a general DIY web scraping process looks like:
Simple enough, right? It is! If you just have a small project. But unfortunately, there are quite a few challenges you need to tackle if you need data at scale. For example, maintaining the scraper if the website layout changes, managing proxies, executing javascript or working around antibots. These are all deeply technical problems that can eat up a lot of resources. That’s part of the reason many businesses choose to outsource their web data projects.
In our experience, price intelligence is the biggest use case for web scraping. Extracting product and pricing information from e-commerce websites, then turning it into intelligence is an important part of modern ecommerce companies that want to make better pricing/marketing decisions based on data.
How web pricing data and price intelligence can be useful:
Market research is critical – and should be driven by the most accurate information available. High quality, high volume, and highly insightful web scraped data of every shape and size is fueling market analysis and business intelligence across the globe.
Unearth alpha and radically create value with web data tailored specifically for investors. The decision-making process has never been as informed, nor data as insightful – and the world’s leading firms are increasingly consuming web scraped data, given its incredible strategic value.
The digital transformation of real estate in the past twenty years threatens to disrupt traditional firms and create powerful new players in the industry. By incorporating web scraped product data into everyday business, agents and brokerages can protect against top-down online competition and make informed decisions within the market.
Modern media can create outstanding value or an existential threat to your business - in a single news cycle. If you’re a company that depends on timely news analyses, or a company that frequently appears in the news, web scraping news data is the ultimate solution for monitoring, aggregating and parsing the most critical stories from your industry.
Lead generation is a crucial marketing/sales activity for all businesses. In the 2020 Hubspot report, 61% of inbound marketers said generating traffic and leads was their number 1 challenge. Fortunately, web data extraction can be used to get access to structured lead lists from the web.
In today’s highly competitive market, it's a top priority to protect your online reputation. Whether you sell your products online and have a strict pricing policy that you need to enforce or just want to know how people perceive your products online, brand monitoring with web scraping can give you this kind of information.
In some situations it can be cumbersome to get access to your data. Maybe you have some data on your own website or on your partner’s website that you need in a structured way. But there’s no easy internal way to do it and it makes sense to create a scraper and simply grab that data. As opposed to trying to work your way through complicated internal systems.
Minimum advertised price (MAP) monitoring is the standard practice to make sure a brand’s online prices are aligned with their pricing policy. With tons of resellers and distributors it’s impossible to monitor the prices manually. That’s why web scraping comes handy because you can keep an eye on your products’ prices without lifting a finger.
Here at Scrapinghub we have been in the web scraping industry for 12 years. We have helped extract web data for more than 1,000 clients ranging from Government Agencies and Fortune 100 companies, to early stage startups and individuals. During this time we gained a tremendous amount of experience and expertise in web data extraction.
Here’s some of our best resources if you want to deepen your web scraping knowledge:
Contact us today if you have a project in mind or try our tools to finish the job yourself - like Scrapy Cloud, Crawlera, and Splash.
