Data scraping has become one of the ultimate tools for merchants, digital marketers, and analysts to use data as a growth accelerant. They use data web scraping to collect huge amounts of data. This way, they leverage it to alleviate risks and induce growth in business.
When professionals perform web scraping, they can easily download the entire web page. Alternative they can download some essential elements such as the title tag or the body content for more analysis.
This was a brief overview of what web scraping is. Today we will help you understand the term web scraping, its advantages, how they are down and some data scraping examples.
So, without any further delay, let's begin.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is when a computer software extracts several types of information or content from several websites from the internet. This is done in a fast and efficient manner with minimum effort.
Although some merchants prefer manual web scraping, professionals use automated tools. Automated web scraping helps save a lot of money, and they help save the team some valuable time under extreme conditions.
Web scraping is not an easy task as different websites are designed with different templates. Hence the task of web scraping may vary in function and features.
Is it legal to web scrap data?
The short answer is web scraping is not illegal. Although, there are some rules that professionals must always follow. It is illegal to extract non publicly available data.
This rule is no surprise, as the number of web data scraping has risen greatly over the past couple of years. Some people have also filed legal cases for web scraping.
How does web scraping benefit your business?
Since so much has been said about web scraping, it might sound illegal to perform. However, that is not the case.
Some businesses make the right use of web scraping, and they benefit from it. Therefore, we are going to cover some advantages of using web scraping.
-
They can be easily implemented
Once you’ve properly deployed the scrapper to extract the data, you can be assured that you will be getting the data not just from a single page but you will get tons of data from the entire domain. It is a one-time investment, and you do not have to worry about it.
-
They are very accurate
They not only work quickly, but they are pretty accurate. When the work is done manually, it might have some human errors that will cost more in the future.
However, with web scraping, data extraction is very accurate. You can get the same price range, sales price, financial number accurately.
-
You get competitor insights
Since you’re scraping for data, you will also get competitive prices, and you can monitor their prices and do proper industry research.
What are some examples of web scraping?
The advantages of web scraping are endless. You can monitor the prices and also analyze the content efficiently. Since data is the key to the growth and development of any website, it became a kind of fascination for some to find new ways for web scraping.
The best example of web scraping is using Python for scraping real estate data. Let's explore some other innovative ways that experts have thought of for web scraping.
Consequently, we will look at some real-life web scraping application examples and how these ideas for web scraping can help the business prosper.
-
Web scraping various hotel data from travel portals with HTML
People do web scraping for hotel websites because it contains tons of data related to the prices, reviews, ratings, people who have rated the hotel, etc.
These professionals use several lines of code on HTML, and they get the data within a matter of time.
-
Scraping data from social media
A study by Oberlo found that around 3.78 billion people use social media in 2021. This amounts to approximately 48% of the total population. This number will likely reach up to 4.41 billion by the year 2025.
Hence social media is the best place for web scraping as data on almost everyone is available here. The codes used for different social media platforms are different, but they can be easily run, and the professional will get huge amounts of data.
-
Scraping data from Yahoo Finance by the use of Python
Python is one of the frequently used and well-known coding languages. Hence it only makes sense that it is time experts will use it for web scraping. They have found a way for web scraping from Yahoo Finance.
Since the stock market is one of the biggest repositories of data, as it is used by almost everyone remotely interested in studying the market and deciding which stocks to buy and when.
Getting access to the current and past trends is a crucial milestone, as it will give the scrapers an exact idea of how the market performs. For this, scrapers have used Python.
-
Scraping job recruiting data
Like social media, the job recruitment industry has also gained a lot of attention with the advancement of the internet. It has also become a major scraping point for experts.
Experts scrape data from the job listings from private and company websites and use it to their advantage. The most common web scraping solution for job recruitment data is JobsPikr. It is an autonomous tool that gets you listed using filters you set.
-
Scraping for insights about various industries
That is the best idea for web scraping. Experts use web scraping for building massive databases and then draw insights related to their specific industry. These experts then sell these data to people interested in these industries.
For example, a company will scrape information related to the oil industry, the oil prices, stock prices, and then this data will be sold to oil companies, and they will earn a profit.
-
Scraping data from comparison websites
You can find numerous websites that give you access to compare and research the prices. These comparisons are made between two different retailers for the same product.
Experts scrape data by scraping competitor product prices, specifications, performance, and pricing of the products daily. This helps them give an accurate comparison to their users when they search for it.
-
They also generate leads
One of the main objectives of creating a new website is to generate new leads. The most common place where web scraping occurs is in the business-to-business space, where clients post details about their business online. This data includes their contact information, their services, prices, their blog articles, etc.
-
Social media sentiment analysis
With the recent boom of social media and the internet, web scraping sentiment analysis has risen.
For example, if you have ever tweeted about an episode of Chernobyl (a series from HBO about the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl), there is a chance it might have been scraped and analyzed by HBO.
This way of web scraping helps them understand how the show is received on social media. However, this was an example of a company web scraping. Web scraping can also be done by individuals, such as politicians on social media, and get an idea of how they are perceived.
-
Scraping is used to get information about the traffic, its size, sources, etc.
Analyzing the traffic size, sources, and how many times a visitor stays on the website is done by web scraping. In this process, the entire domains are analyzed, and the scraper will estimate the traffic.
You can also understand the traffic source by scraping the top five countries that have the most visits and the top five domains used by them.
-
Web scraping for content creation
To ensure they retain their visibility, companies need to post huge amounts of high-quality and relevant content. By having regular content, they can create a trustworthy and visible brand.
The marketing and advertising experts scrape the internet. They get plenty of new ideas for content, and they need not brainstorm for ideas. This helps them create new content and attract more visitors, thereby increasing their sales and revenue.
Closing thoughts
As mentioned above, web scraping is not a bad thing, as it can help you learn more about the industry and the market. The web scraping examples mentioned here are just the tip of the iceberg.
An expert knows the best way to utilize this and will find ways for web scraping for their benefit. This is where Wersel’s web scraping tools like Price Intelligence come in handy. They emerge as your organization’s favorite tool to utilize data and extract actionable insights. Get to know more about our Price Intelligence tool and how it propels your conversion goals.
