Explaining the Basic Framework of Web Scraping

Sometimes, as a marketer, you might need to gather data from several websites to adjust your marketing goals and strategies. This operation takes an immense amount of time, and let’s be honest, it’s not efficient if you try to do it manually. Every single website has dozens of pages full of texts and images. So, how can you read and save the data you need from numerous websites? Is it possible to use help to automate the data collection process? The short answer is, indeed, it is.

 

Web Scraping software can scan, scrap and save data from websites easily. They are effortless to handle, user-friendly, and fast. Web Scraping uses bots to collect data quick and effective. The best part is, it is better than screen scraping. Screen scraping bots can only scan the pixels on the screen. But Web Scraping helps you collect every single piece of data on a web page, including HTML codes.

 

What Is Required for Web Scraping?

You can use most Web Scraping bots without coding knowledge, but advanced scraping needs expertise. In that case, you may need at least some basic coding skills. Choosing the best Web Scraping tool for your operations depends on the scale, as well as other factors. You can try some of the free tools to get a grip of what you need. For example, some RPA bots are easy to use for simple processes, and you don’t have to write a single line of code. Determine your targets, choose your software and move on with Web Scraping. That’s all!

 

What to Expect from Web Scraping Tools?

Web Scraping tools are capable of completing different tasks smoothly. Most of them are successful at

• extracting and transforming content from websites,
• recognizing HTML structures of websites,
• storing scraped data,
• and extracting data from APIs.

 

So you can use them more frequently than you think during your business management processes. Let’s assume that you need specific information about your competitors. Web Scraping software can aid you to get detailed data from their websites. You can get the HTML structure of their websites and gather the content in a database with a few simple steps. It allows you to check their data anytime you want. By using Web Scraping tools, your company can have a well-designed research process.

 

What Can Web Scraping Be Used for?

You can benefit from Web Scraping tools in different operations of your business. Let’s check some of them.

• Revenue Optimization
• Competitor Monitoring
• Dynamic Pricing
• Product Trend Monitoring

Marketing specialists can use Web Scraping tools for several reasons, such as the following.

 

Trend Analysis

Web Scraping tools make it easy to stay up to date with the newest trends in your industry. You don’t need to look at every single website manually. You can check the collected data anytime you want and adapt your operations accordingly. You may even be the trendsetter of your sector.

 

Market Pricing

Optimizing your pricing strategy is complicated and exhausting most of the time. You have to visit competitor websites, marketplaces, check every price tag for each equivalent product, compare them, etc. Then decide how to price your products or services. Web Scraping tools make it possible to collect pricing data from various websites. You can manage pricing operations simpler than you think. 

 

Competitor Monitoring

While you’re at it, you can monitor competing company or brand websites. Your collected data for market pricing is also a way to stay updated with the web technologies of your competitors. It will become easier for you to spot opportunities in your market, like lead generation or when to update your website.

 

Web Scraping Use Cases

Some of the use cases of Web Scraping tools are significantly powerful and effective for your business. For example, you can improve the productivity of various departments. Your research process wouldn’t be a chore and timewaster.

 

Data Operations

Most of the companies are using tools as data collectors and organizers. It depends on your business which data to collect and how to use them. You can use sports events data for betting websites or stock exchange data for the finance industry.

 

App or Website Building

Do you have a simple app idea but don’t know how to collect data for that project? Web Scraping bots can help you with that. 

 

Let’s say you want to create an app that can send notifications about the weather forecast and changes in weather throughout the day. You can collect data from forecast websites, process the data to update your app momentarily and send push notifications to users. It’s simpler than you think with Web Scraping bots.

 

Getting Product Lists

You can collect product lists from diverse retailers or marketplace websites easily. It can reduce the time of market research and provide you with a database.

 

Database Websites

You can design database websites with the help of tools. You can collect data from different websites, gather them and promote them on your website.

 

For example, you can create a website for job postings. You can collect data from LinkedIn and other job posting platforms, optimize your website for search engines and get a good amount of traffic. Web Scraping tools can help you to get data from other websites. Finding a way to use them creatively is up to you.

 

You can create your real estate, car selling or news website with the same logic. Or maybe, you can redirect your visitors to restaurants for delivery? But be careful that you don’t break any laws and what you’re doing is legal. You probably can’t have revenue in such cases.

 

Search Engine

Believe it or not, Google works in the same logic with Web Scraping bots. So, it means you can have your search engine. You may need to invest heavily in coding and servers for a search engine to compete with Google. It scans numerous —we mean tens of, hundreds of millions— of web pages ubiquitously. Also, it uses complicated algorithms to offer the “best results” for queries.

 

You don’t have to create a search engine for everything, though. It is possible to use Web Scrapping to build an industry-specific search engine. Let’s say, a search engine for fintech companies.

 

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