Web scraping and data engineering can turn that wish into a reality. With these two, you can automate the process of gathering data from different websites and sources, processing, and organizing that data into useful actionable insights for your business. This facilitates faster and better decision-making, giving your business a competitive edge – all without the hassle of having to visit websites to manually collect, process, and organize data every now and then.
Employing web scraping services and solutions from a trusted web scraping company can help you save time, cut down manual labor, and obtain accurate, up-to-date data to allow your company to make better business decisions that would keep you ahead of the competition.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping uses software tools to automate the process of extracting data from different websites and sources, including emerging market trends, customer reviews, stock prices, contact information, sentiment analysis, and competitor pricing. After it is extracted, the data is then converted from unstructured HTML content to structured information, making it easier to store, analyze, and use for market research, price intelligence, lead generation, or any other intended purpose. This structured format can be in the form of CSV, PDF, DOC files, or Excel spreadsheets.
Essentially, web scraping provides businesses with an efficient way of collecting vast data from the web, making it a key tool for corporations in the current digital era.
For example, partnering with a data scraping company can provide access to advanced tools and expertise for extracting structured data efficiently and ethically.
So how does web scraping work?
There are a number of techniques that can be used to scrape data from the web; for instance:
API scraping – this method uses an API (Application Programming Interface) provided in a specific website to access and extract data. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, among others, include APIs that can be used to scrape and access data more easily and in a structured format.
DOM parsing – in this method, the required data is retrieved from nodes on the webpage using DOM (Document Object Model), which transforms HTML code into a tree-like structure to make it easy to scrape the information.
HTML parsing – in this web scraping approach, the HTML code is broken down into basic elements like classes, attributes, tags, and text content, making it easier to locate and scrape the relevant data.
Regardless of the web scraping technique, each of these methods allows you to extract information from a website, process it, and create a data file (like a PDF or Excel Templates) containing the scraped data. In general, the process includes requests being sent to a specific site’s server using a bot, script, or program. After the HTML code is retrieved, the program then parses it to find specific data elements using “locators” like XPath, class names, or tags. Finally, the identified elements are used to get the necessary information, which is stored in a structured format like a PDF or CSV file.
For example, let’s say that your company wants to know the pricing of your competitors’ products or services. Instead of going through the hassle of visiting their websites or social media pages to check individual products or services, you can employ the services of a web scraping company to automate the process. This includes special programs being used to analyze various web content and extract the specific data needed to eliminate the need for manually entering data. This way, the relevant data is automatically extracted across different sources, including social media platforms, blogs, e-commerce websites, and review aggregator sites, among others, and then organized in a structured format like PDF to make it easier to read, compare, and analyze.
Benefits of web scraping and data engineering
The explosion of information on social media, e-commerce websites, and other websites in the past two decades has led to vast volumes of data. And with more and more organizations adopting data-driven approaches, web scraping has become a key tool for businesses to gain valuable insights. In fact, a recent Statista report shows that over 149 zettabytes of data have been generated, extracted, copied, and consumed in 2024 and projects that this figure will increase to over 394 zettabytes in the next 5 years. And with such exponential growth, data engineering and web scraping techniques are preferable over manual collection for a number of reasons, for example:
Customer analysis – web scraping allows you to study and understand customer behavior and sentiment based on reviews from different platforms, including social media and review aggregator sites like Yelp, Google My Business, and Capterra, among others.
Lead generation – employing web scraping services allows you to easily collect contact information from different platforms and create a list of potential clients that can also be used to create marketing campaigns.
Data aggregation – by automatically visiting and extracting relevant content from different sources and platforms, web scraping techniques make it easy to create a comprehensive database that can be used to provide key insights by a business to give them a competitive edge.
Price intelligence – using web scraping tools and programs, you can track real-time changes in products and services’ pricing from different competitors’ websites or social media platforms.
Market research – the data collected using web scraping and organized using data engineering techniques can be used to inform your company of the best business strategies to take based on the current market trends and competitor products and pricing.
To outsource or not to outsource web scraping services
You might think that web scraping is a simple process. After all, it only includes the few steps of identifying the target site, collecting the target pages’ URL, making requests to the server to extract the relevant content, and saving the information in PDF or CSV files. However, you would be largely mistaken. While the process might be clear-cut for small web scraping tasks, it gets rather complex if you need to scrape data on a large scale or in other sophisticated situations. Take, for instance, if you wanted to scrape data from a site whose layout keeps changing or where you have to manage proxies, execute JavaScript, or work around antibots. Such situations would require complex scraping solutions, e.g., the constantly-changing website layout might require the implementation of a dynamic scraper that uses patterns like XPath to adapt to the changes. To bypass the antibot processes, it might mean using APIs to ensure that you are fetching data from the website ethically and legally. All these processes can be very complex, requiring technical expertise to develop advanced programs, implement them properly, and constantly monitor to ensure that everything runs smoothly and accurately.
This is one of the many reasons why it is recommendable to outsource web scraping solutions from a trusted web scraping company. Outsourcing with GroupBWT gives you a smooth operation, providing you with efficient, worry-free web scraping, content extraction, and data organization experience.
Why you need a web scraping and data engineering company
GroupBWT uses advanced tools and processes that ensure efficient extraction, cleaning, and organization of data to save you time and resources while providing quality, actionable insights to facilitate decision-making processes in your business. Other key reasons include:
Cost-effectiveness – employing web scraping services eliminates the costs that would have been on acquiring specialized infrastructure and software as well as hiring, training, and maintaining a support team.
Expertise – as one of the leading data scraping companies, GroupBWT includes some of the world’s best web scraping services and state-of-the-art infrastructure to ensure that you get accurate and quality data extraction.
Scalability – outsourcing web scraping services and solutions means that as your company’s data needs grow, you can easily scale your data collection efforts without needing to invest in additional personnel or tools.
Legal compliance – with tons of experience from years of service, GroupBWT ensures that your web scraping and data extraction efforts are in line with legal and ethical guidelines, such as GDPR.
Risk management – this includes ensuring that your IP isn’t banned when scraping data from different platforms or experiencing disruptions.
To sum up
Web scraping solutions are beneficial for numerous reasons, including data extraction, market insights, price intelligence, competitor analysis, and real-time updates, among many others. However, the process should be undertaken in consideration of the guiding laws, industry standards, and organizational policies to ensure that it is done ethically and legally. This is why it is important to outsource from a web scraping service company to ensure compliance and responsible use of data.
At GroupBWT, we ensure that businesses get valuable insights and competitive intelligence through ethical web scraping services to avoid litigation and promote credibility.
