Scraping a website means getting data to make better business decisions. In this article, we will show you how to do so without knowing how to code.

 

In fact, you will learn that much of the information you need can be extracted with just one click. So you don’t need to outsource the tasks or buy a complex business system. It can be quite simple. Here is why.

Why scrape a website?

Three is two reasons why you would scrape a website:

Market factors

Market factors mean getting data that can help you understand your competitive landscape. Such use case includes:

Analytics & surveillance

Analytical and surveillance mean getting insights that help you run your business more professionally and in a data-driven manner. Such areas include:

As you can see the potential cases where web scraping makes business sense are quite overwhelming, and once you get into it, you will soon discover the endless opportunities you now have to improve how your business is run. Later in this article, we will go through each of the use cases in more detail.

 

For now, we will let you know how a web scraper works and how you can extract data with just one click.

How does a web scraper work?

Getting a web scraper means getting a new set of options on what you can do with online content. Instead of seeing content in a browser as something you read in the browser, you now have the option of working with the data in a much more systematic way.

 

This is possible because the web scraper lets you select the part of the browser data that you need for your business, and then extract it out of the browser. In most cases, this means getting a data sheet like Excel or a CSV file.

 

From a tech point of view, what a web scraper does is read the HTML on a page and then lets you select the text and data that you need. In other words, all the code that is used to make the website look nice, the navigation, and all the other web page components are removed. What is left is the dataset that you need.

 

Many of the web scrapers are quite intelligent and can crawl a site to find the data you need automatically.

 

The latest generation of the technology even comes with pre-built templates that let you select downloadable content with a single click.

 

From a technology point of view, you will find two types of web scrapers, server-based and browser-based.

Server-based web scraping

Server-based are run remotely and access the sites that you want to extract data from via a server call. This is smart because it makes it possible to scale how the services are run. It is also smart because such a set-up makes it fairly easy to submit the extracted data via APIs to other business systems.

 

The drawback is the ease of use and the price of the set-up. A server-based setup is often a small IT application that requires configuration, maintenance. Also, the cost of setting up new extraction can be high, since this will most often require the use of tech-skilled persons.

Browser-based web scraping

In browser-based web scraping, you extract data in your browser via a plug-in. This can be a fast and convenient way of collecting data from websites. In many new generation tools, it is even possible to collect data with just one click. Browser-based tools are almost always cheaper to use than server-based, both from a software cost perspective and from the effort you need to make them work.

 

The drawback of browser-based tools is scalability in how you can automate the data extraction. The tools only work when your browser is on and active. This means that you cannot design a system that runs collection jobs on a regular basis. Also, integration into other business systems can be less automated than is the case with server-based tools.

 

However, getting data from a website in just one click requires a browser-based solution. So we keep our focus on this technology branch.

How to extract web data with one click

 If you use a tool like Kaddara then it is possible to do data extraction in just one click. This is possible because the tool has a set of pre-defined templates.

 

There are three categories, leads, E-commerce, and Competitor monitoring. The two first categories have hundreds of templates that let you collect the data you need.

 

Leads let you collect data from websites like LinkedIn, Google Maps, Yelp the Yellow pages. Here you can get business data of local companies, contact persons, and insights into how are in the niche you are targeting, such as dentists in Chicago.

 

The e-commerce templates force on extracring prices and production information from sites like Amazon, e-bay, and Walmart.

 

The last area lets you collect key competitor metrics linked to web page updates, new employees that is relevant if you need to track what your competitors are doing.

 

This link takes you to a demo version of the Kaddara platform, where you can see how the tool can help you collect website data with ease.

Inspiration and Use Cases

We will now dig deeper into the three main categories of web scraping use cases; Market factors, analytical & surveillance, and automation.

 

Market factors

Market factors mean getting data that can help you understand your competitive landscape. Such use case includes:

Analytical and surveillance

Analytical and surveillance mean getting insights that help you run your business more professionally and data-driven manner. Such use cases include:

Automation

The last element is automation, where the goal is to include the data finding from the two other categories in a flow where they are integrated with your business processes and workflow.

 

We will now go through the different Use Cases in more detail, starting with Market factors.

Market factor Use cases

Market factors mean getting data that can help you understand your competitive landscape, and how you can conduct your business. Web scraping can be a core component to do this in a professional and data-driven manner.

 

Lead Generation

Lead generation has been a core driver for the development of web scraping. Lead generation can be split into B2B and B2C lead generation.

 

Today almost all lead generation from websites are B2B leads. You can also collect B2B leads from websites, but there is now so much personal data protection legalization in place that you will find yourself in a grey zone pretty fast.

 

So, we assume that lead generation is B2B leads. There are lots of sources where such leads can be collected, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Maps, Conference sites, etc.

 

You will find many specialized tools that target the different platforms, and they can be designed both to collect and qualify the data you extract from the web.

 

E-commerce: Price data

If you are an e-commerce business then you would most likely compete on price. So you would like to know how your competitors price their products. This is especially important if the products they sell are identical to yours – meaning the same SKU / EAN number.

 

So you would be interested in getting competitor price data, to know how you stand toward your competition. You can use a web scraper to do so.

 

This is one of the use cases where you would also like automation. Since you would like to monitor the prices frequently and to do a systematic reporting of the price into your business systems.

 

This setup is also known as a price robot and you can get tailormade software solutions that can do this on your behalf.

 

E-commerce: Product data

As an e-commerce business, you might also need information on how your competitors describe their products. This information is available on the web in many forms.

 

Knowing product information can give you inspiration on how you can improve your own communication if you sell similar products. You can also use product data extraction to validate potential new products that you are considering including on your site.

 

Industry portals (Real estate, Travel Industry & Job-portals)

There are some special niches where collecting competitor actives from web pages on a broader scale makes more sense. Real Estate, the Travel Industry, and HR.

 

All these lines of business have portals that display valuable content and insights into the industry. Let’s say you operate a hotel in Darwin Australia.

 

You would be interested in knowing your competitor’s prices (over time), tour operator products, and air fair prices because all such factors influence the overall attractiveness of your product. Getting insights from such portals in a structured way can in this way help you run your business more professionally.

 

The same dynamics apply to real estate, job portals, restaurants, and other industries.

 

Minimum advertised price

For many brands, it is important to ensure a premium experience of their products. One of the ways to do that is to make sure you have stable pricing, So, many brands operate with a Minimum Advertised Price or suggested Retail Price.

 

They would need to ensure that their retailers follow their guidelines, and to be able to do so, they need to monitor the prices of their products.

 

There are dedicated software solutions that can help them do so, where you scan web pages from known (and unknown) online retailers to check prices and their pricing history.

 

Analytical & surveillance

Analytical and surveillance mean getting insights that help you run your business more professionally and data-driven manner. As you will see, this can be relevant for many types of business functions.

 

Market research

Making the data drive market becomes more and more critical for most businesses.

 

The web and the data you find here will in most cases be a cornerstone in the data needed for this kind of work. Some of the areas web-based data can help create better value in marked research are; trend analysis, market pricing, R&D, and competitor monitoring.

 

Finance and Investor intelligence

Financial decisions are most often based on intelligence reports. So the exact same reasons that apply for market research apply to Finance and investor intelligence too.

 

Here their goal is to evaluate the true value of a business, based on its actives, the performance of its products, and the markets the company operates in.

 

The web will provide insight into all such areas, where web scraping can help you access the information in real-time and at scale. So extracting data from the web will help you make more professional decisions.

 

Content monitoring

Content monitoring has many branches. It can be industry, market, brand, or product-specific data you are looking for. This information helps managers know and understand how their brand and products are perceived among customers, influencers, and the media.

 

Content monitoring is especially used to spot bad stories before they grow big, so you can apply appropriate damage control if a story spins out of control.

 

Brand monitoring

You can say that brand monitoring is a sub-branch of content monitoring. Here the purpose is to monitor who is saying what on your brand.

 

You would like to do so to evaluate the efforts of your brand positioning, and also to be able to conduct damage control if for some reason bad stories of your brand start to evolve.

 

Competitor monitor

Monitoring your competitors can be a core component for making the right-marked depictions for your company.

 

This is especially true for businesses that have few competitors. Such businesses would probably meet compete with offers on the same tasks and projects all the time. So if you are producing windmills, like Vestas then you would meet Siemens and GM in almost all the projects you bid on.

 

So your chance of getting the offer highly depends on how your competitor behaves. If Simemes has just won a streak of tenders, then they would probably be less likely to reduce their prices. But if they have idle production capacity then they would.

 

Getting such information from competitors online can help you make better business decisions, and you would use a web scraper to do so.

 

Social Media & PR

Consumer brands are more and more driven by activities that take place in the social media space. This trend is even becoming more and more true for B2B driven businesses tool.

 

So you need to monitor and collect data from the media to be able to monitor and analyze how your business and brand are performing on such channels.

 

Scraped data from Social Media can help you become more professional in how you approach the social media domain.

 

News

The dynamic that applies to Social Media also applies to the new section.

 

As a brand and business owner, you would like to know, monitor and analysis how your brand and your competitors are presented in the news. You would use web data extraction to do so.

 

Broad Business Intelligence

Many of the cases that we have just mentioned are in fact business intelligence data. However, on a meta-level, you would also be able to get business data extraction from the web that can help you make more qualified business deductions.

 

You can scrape websites and get data on market development projections, market demographics, retailer lists, and much more. Such data can help management make data-driven and qualified decisions on the strategic and tactical actions in your business.

Automation

The last Use Case segmentation is automation. You would need automation if the intelligence from your web data must be applied to your business processes. This will be the case if you have workflows or systems that would need web data as part of how they perform their tasks.

 

So you would apply automation if you need the web data on a regular basis, in real-time, and in large volumes.

 Web scraping FAQ

We have collected the most commonly used question on web scraping in this FAQ.

 

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is a process that collects data from an HTML page in a systematic way so that the extracted data can be used as pure text for business purposes.

 

What does extract data mean?

Extracting data, or scraped data is content that you have collected from a website in a format that can be used by your business.

 

What is HTML?

Html is the coding language that browsers use to display content in a website. When you extract data from a site, you do not want HTML code, as you are only interested in the pure text.

 

What is Python?

Phyton is a modern coding language that is used to build web scraping tools. If you buy a server-based scraping tool then it will most likely be made with python and might require knowledge of the language to conduct advanced coding to get data from specific websites or URLs.

Conclusion – Scrape website with ease

This article has covered how you can boost your business by incorporating data collected from websites, also now as web scraping. There a numerous use cases on how data from web pages can be applied for different business purposes.

 

You have two core choices to make when you select the tool to collect your web data. One category is server-based, one is browser-based. Server-based tools are more robust more expensive and have more integration options. Browser-based solutions are cheaper, can be configured without tech knowledge, and can be applied for many use-cases fast.

 

The choice between the two should be determined by how you need the web data. Are you having lots of small use cases scenarios that you need to pursue, then the browser-based would be the preferred solution.

 

Server-based solutions can be used to collect data from web pages in a more systematic approach. Server-based solutions are also less flexible and more expensive than browser-based.