Contents
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping involves bots fetching the HTML code of a website and replicating it elsewhere. This is a form of data extraction used for news monitoring, price intelligence (for eCommerce sellers), sentiment analysis, and more.
Usually, websites make their data available to the public, which means it is legal to extract and use it. However, it is important to know the difference between legal and malicious scraping.
Data Extraction
Web scraping techniques can extract large amounts of data from websites and deliver them in a suitable format for your analytics platform or spreadsheets. The process is faster than manual or copy-paste checks, and delivers more structured data.
Most sites are not set up for scraping, and a number of websites explicitly block automatic extraction. To avoid this limitation, use targeted scraping to limit the scope of your extraction. Moreover, employ error handling techniques to deal with problems such as websites changing their layout, returning errors, or adding CAPTCHAs to prevent scraping.
Data extraction using web scraping improves decision-making by providing insight, accurate information to various stakeholders throughout the organization. It helps companies gain a competitive edge by optimizing marketing strategies and improving their bottom line. That is why technology has become an important part of many industries. Its popularity continues to grow because it offers an economical and flexible way to collect and analyze data.
Market research
Market research is a core function that enables companies to gain competitive advantage. This includes researching competitors and understanding varying market trends, which requires data from various sources.
Using web scraping techniques, marketers can extract information from websites and save it in a convenient format. They can then analyze it for various purposes, including competitor analysis, price trends, and customer opinion.
In this way, firms can use the data to identify potential customers and launch targeted marketing campaigns. This can lead to a more productive business landscape.
automation
Using web scraping techniques, you can automate the entire process of collecting and crunching data. This saves a lot of time and effort, which is especially important for jobs that involve several websites.
For example, the marketing team may need to collect price information and product descriptions from multiple sources for comparison purposes. They should also monitor news sites for current events. Or, a company might want to track public sentiment on social media.
Collecting this data manually would be time consuming and inefficient. However, it is possible to automate this task by creating a scraping script in Python. This code can scan multiple websites for the desired data, parse it and store it for future reference. Codes can be saved to a database and even set to run at regular intervals. However, be careful of violating the terms of service on the website and avoid spamming the server with too many requests. This can cause websites to block or slow down their performance.
Stay Informed
Often times, businesses need to be on top of their game to stay competitive and offer attractive pricing strategies to customers. Web scraping techniques can help businesses stay up-to-date by collecting data from online forums and news websites to identify market trends and customer opinions.
This information can be useful in various business strategies. For example, a fashion brand can use web scraping to collect local store contact information so they can target potential customers. Companies can also monitor competitors’ prices to ensure that they can keep their own prices competitive and still make a profit.
While some may be intimidated by all the coding that web scraping requires, it’s actually quite simple and not as complicated as it sounds. If you need a more streamlined way to access the information you want from a website, try using a relational database that follows a structured schema with rows and columns for easier searching.