April 28, 2023
Introduction to Scraping: How to Retrieve the Data You're Interested in from Any Website?
Marketing
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28/4/23
Introduction to Scraping: How to Retrieve the Data You're Interested in from Any Website?
Marketing
What is Web Scraping and Data Enrichment?
Web scraping is a technique for extracting data or content from a website via software. Most sites you visit only allow you to view the content offered, but do not allow copying or downloading the content. Manually copying this data could take weeks!
Web scraping is the technique of automating this process so that intelligent software can help you extract and collect data from the web pages of your choice and save it in a structured format.
This tool will automatically load several pages one by one and can extract data based on what you need.
With a simple click, you can easily save the data available on a website in a file on your computer (for example, in CSV or Excel format).
Why do Web Scraping?
The major advantage of web scraping is the time savings. You can automate data extraction and thus collect data that is readable and easily usable.Web scraping is particularly useful when you need to extract large volumes of data that are regularly updated. By automating it, you can access up-to-date data in real-time and study their evolution.
For example, if you want to compare prices on several sites at the same time or if you need to conduct market research with a large amount of data to process, we recommend using a web scraping tool to save time.
Indeed, there are several legal uses of web scraping that your company can employ. Here are a few examples:
Use Cases
Market Research
With scraping, you can see what your customers, prospects, or even your competitors are doing in a simulated file. This allows you to keep an eye on your market and avoids heavy research.
Automation
If you regularly need to collect and process large volumes of data, web extraction can prove to be a valuable tool. For example, if you need to collect data from ten different websites, it will take time, as the extraction methods may not necessarily be the same from one site to another.
To avoid manually going through different processes on each site, you can use a web extractor to do it automatically.
Analysis of Customer Reviews
Your company can perform web scraping on online review platforms and on social media to monitor its e-reputation or that of your competitors.
Lead Generation
Scraping is a great tool for generating valuable prospect lists with little effort. Even though you must define your goals precisely upfront, you can use web extraction to collect enough user data and thus create structured prospect lists.
The results may vary from one list to another, but it's more convenient and efficient than creating lists yourself.
How to do Web Scraping?
Web extraction might seem complicated at first glance, but it's very simple.
The methods and tools can vary depending on your goals, but all you have to do is find a way to automatically browse the targeted website(s) and extract the data directly. Generally, these steps are carried out using scrapers and crawlers:
- Crawlers: These are basic programs that browse the web searching for and indexing content. Analyzers can guide site extractors, but they are not exclusively used for this purpose. To give you an example, the Google search engine uses analyzers to update site indexes and rankings.
- Scrapers: Scrapers' role is to quickly extract relevant information from websites. These are structured in HTML, the extractors use regular expressions (regex), XPath, CSS selectors, and other locators to quickly find and extract certain data.
If all this seems a bit complicated, know that most web extraction tools have integrated analyzers and extractors. This will allow you to easily perform various tasks depending on your goals.
What Scraping Tools to Use?
There are numerous scraping software programs, some are more complex than others and do not have the same features, which is why we offer a selection of tools based on your needs.
Easy-to-Use Tools:
PhantomBuster is a prospecting automation tool on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as on Google Maps. With this software, you can extract data from your contacts and sort them into an Excel file.
This tool is very handy and will save you time in your online prospecting tasks. You can even automate connection requests with different users, send them a message, and invite them to follow you.
At Spaag, this is the tool we regularly use especially on LinkedIn to collect B2B target emails and create audiences (or lookalikes) on Meta.
You can add this tool to your Chrome browser, it will be possible to extract data from any source, automate your tasks and then enrich the data you have collected (directly in your previously downloaded files).
The advantage of Browserflow is that it has a wide variety of executable commands, and you can integrate code if you wish to automate your extraction tasks.
A free version is available so you can test the tool.
Slightly more complex tools
Captain Data is a SaaS tool that allows you to automate the retrieval, aggregation, and consolidation of web data. As a user, you just need to choose the sites to explore and the nature of the content to extract, information about your prospects for example, and then schedule the extraction frequency. The software automates the process.
Captain Data is a paid tool offering a free trial for 14 days.
LaGrowthMachine will allow you to automate several of your channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, emails, or even your campaigns. With a few drags and drops, you can import your prospects from LinkedIn and launch prospecting sequences or create a multichannel and automated campaign.
Octoparse is a software for scraping with an easy-to-use interface. Your data extraction is done in three steps: entering a URL, clicking on the targeted data, and running the program. It then retrieves content in an organized manner.
The basic features offered by the software are free. If you want access to more advanced features, like scheduling tasks, you will need to take the paid subscription.
ParseHub is software that you can download. It is mainly aimed at analysts, journalists, and e-merchants. This tool is very practical because it allows extracting a large volume of web data and obtaining it in an Excel file.
This software has a free version but also a paid and non-binding version with advanced functions like accelerated extraction.
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L’équipe Spaag.
Spaag is a consulting firm specialising in growth marketing, digital marketing, data, and AI. Our mission is to support our B2B and B2C clients in achieving their business objectives, both in France and internationally.
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