Studies show that 95% of new startups rely on data science to drive innovation and compete against other players in their industry. However, people often assume extracting data is either difficult or expensive. But the reality isn’t the same, especially when you leverage web scraping.
Web scraping is the process of extracting publicly available data from the web using tools known as web scrapers. These tools make data extraction from online sources easy, convenient, quick, and affordable.
Using web data, businesses are able to:
- Conduct market research
- Monitor the price of competitors
- Discover market trends and patterns
- Develop new products
In today’s guide, we’ll explore the advantages, practical applications, and how to get started with web scraping to collect web data at scale.
Why Use Web Scraping Over Manual Data Collection
Although it requires time to develop and implement a well crafted web scraper, web scraping is an automated process by definition, making it a more scalable strategy over manual data input.
To make the comparison between the two easier to grasp, here are three main reasons to choose web scraping over manual data collection for your project:
Affordability
Web scraping is more economical. No matter what the size of your company is or how much data you need to extract and organize, you only pay for:
- The software – like proxy pools or scraping solutions
- The server resources
Eliminating the labor cost that breaks the bank when done manually.
Even considering the investment on engineering/development time, once set up, your web scrapers can run automatically with no human intervention. This automation feature is beneficial for startups and small businesses, as it reduces ongoing operational expenses. With no costly corrections and verifications, you get accurate data at a quick turnaround.
Of course, this cost savings are more apparent the bigger the project. You can quickly scale your scrapers and start collecting data from millions of web pages, without adding much overhead.
The same can’t be said for manual data collection.
Efficiency and Speed
Web scraping processes data extractions at large-scale in a matter of minutes or a couple of hours at max with no proportional increases in workforce and time.
You gain access to real-time data collection and analysis by defining the intervals at which you’d like to refresh data. It could be every certain minutes, hours, days, or other elapsed times.
This advantage can be a game changer for businesses, allowing them to:
- Gain current insights and trends in their sector
- Track competitors continuously
- Make quick, time-sensitive decisions
Enhancing productivity and focus by removing redundancy tasks.
With web scraping tools to handle data with integrity and accuracy, your team can focus on getting the insights you need to make strategic decisions faster.
Adaptability
There is a wide range of applications for web scraping. To get the most out of them, you can modify them to fit your needs. For example:
- Online businesses may scrape data through forums and search engines for sentiment analysis and insights into competitors.
- Digital marketing businesses use web scrapers for market research, gathering client feedback, and tracking marketing platform data.
- Aggregators use web scraping to get product/service information, compare prices to show on their website, and update their listings.
- Service businesses scrape data across the web to find the right leads and target them with lead-nurturing campaigns.
The ability to personalize the tools to suit their unique requirements makes web scraping a perfect strategy to feed data to your analytics teams or apps.
Web scraping is convenient for anyone who wants to access any data from any website while maximizing the value extracted from the data.
Specific Use Cases of Web Scraping
Say if you have a product/service idea in mind and would want to start a business with it. How can web scraping help you? Below are three practical uses of web scraping to improve your bottom line by helping you refine your products and services.
1. Conduct Market Research and Competitive Analysis
Use a data scraping tool to study your market on product trends in demand or to figure out the pain point that has the potential to be solved.
Also, compile data from competitor websites on their:
- Pricing strategies
- Product availability
- Promotional activities
With this information, you can adjust your product and pricing models and identify gaps in the market to maximize.
Scraping product reviews can also help you improve your products or focus on common concerns to outperform your competitors. This data can be used to direct product development and create customer service strategies that address customer needs and preferences.
2. Leverage Business Intelligence and Analytics
Use web scraping tools to automate sales data collection and leverage trend analytics from various sources, such as:
- E-commerce platforms
- Competitor websites
- Marketplaces
- Google Trends
Analyze Google trends to better position yourself in the market with popular topics gaining traction. Also, keep an eye on topics that have gained traction for a long period; these are good indicators of a product launch opportunity that aligns with it.
By scraping reviews, comments, and social media discussions, you can also understand what customers like, prefer, and tend to buy. Use this information to devise marketing strategies and manage your inventory.
3. Content Aggregation and Media Monitoring
Last but not least, use automated scraping of diverse content to get inspiration for your own content creation. Keep an eye on your industry-specific content by scraping data from relevant sources, such as:
- News articles
- Online discussions (Reddit, Quora)
- News mentions
- Competitor blog posts
- Social media updates
Create a comprehensive, up-to-date content strategy around specific trending topics to make sure you reach the audience with relevant content each time. You can also use the information to organize tailored events and collaborate with PR firms and media companies to shape public interest and sentiment toward your brand.
Web Scraping Made Simple with ScraperAPI
As you can imagine, web scraping requires a certain level of technical expertise to be done correctly, as there are many moving pieces you need to manage to successfully access web data without getting blocked by anti-bots – especially on high-traffic websites.
To simplify the entire process and speed up data collection, using a web scraping solution like ScraperAPI is ideal.
ScraperAPI is a powerful web scraping tool that lets anyone extract data from any web source without:
- Managing proxies
- Handling CAPTCHAs
- Building headless browsers.
It uses machine learning and statistical analysis to handle all of these complexities and technical challenges, saving you hundreds of hours of development and maintenance time.
Let’s explore what it offers in more detail.
Key Features and Benefits
- IP rotation and CAPTCHA bypass: Get stable and reliable access to any website, even the ones protected by CAPTCHAs, IP blocking and advanced bot blockers like DataDome and CloudFlare.
- Scrape on Autopilot, 24/7: Automate extensive data collection from any platform, any time. Set triggers to update information at specific intervals, such as every hour, day, month, etc.
- Ready-to-Use Templates: Speed up data collection and transformation using dedicated endpoints. Get data from domains like Google and Amazon in JSON and CSV format.
- Easy Workflow Integration: No matter your techstack or business use case, you can integrate ScraperAPI with a simple API call.
- Customize It to Your Needs: Custom headers, geographic locations, and other customization options are combined in one place, making your scraping tasks highly accurate.
- Safe and Secure: Handles and transmits data without breaching privacy and protecting the user’s data.
- Cost-effective: Various pricing plans make it very affordable for different needs, be it a small project or continuous monitoring for large firms.
How To Get Started With ScraperAPI?
Getting started is quick and easy. Just create a free ScraperAPI account to get access to your unique API key and 5,000 API credits.
After that, choose the right approach to get the data you need. Here are a couple choices:
- Use our structured data endpoints (SDEs) to get structured JSON or CSV data from domains like Google, Amazon and Walmart.
- Use DataPipeline to automate and schedule recurrent scraping jobs.
- Use our standard Scraping API to bypass anti-bots and get access to your target sites at scale.
Want to try it for yourself? Here’s a simple script you can use to collect product data from Amazon using our dedicated Amazon SDE:
This script will turn the Amazon result page into ready-to-use JSON product data.
Note: Remember to add your API key to the “api_key” parameter. You can also replace the targeted query for any query you’re interested in.
The Future of Data Collection is Web Scraping
There you have it—a comprehensive guide on web scraping and how to get started.
Future advancements in technology and growing data demands will create increasing numbers of applications for web scraping in different industries. In fact, AI and machine learning algorithms will further contribute to better accuracy and increased efficiency of data extraction.
Stay ahead of the curve by building your own scrapers with easy-to-use tools such as ScraperAPI.
