You are marketer, SEO-specialist or a business owner? Then, no doubt, you need an actual info about your competitors’ activities, some data from market research or just a SERP-data to follow your product page ranking and progress.
Over the past decade there has been an explosive growth of a data stored in WWW. According to the leading global provider of a market intelligence IDC by the year 2025, the general amount of all digital data generated throughout the world will grow up to 175 zettabytes against 40 zettabytes in 2020. To date about 5 billions World Wide Web users generate a new data every second and it is, of course, a priceless and reliable information source. The only thing left for any researcher – is to extract that info and then analyze it in a right way. So, there are two major tasks when someone wishes to realize data procession. The first one – is a data extraction. And the second one – is a data analyzing.
Well, there is no doubt, data extracting itself isn’t the final goal for whatever project. The final goal in general – is to get actual and correct information on the basis of a collected data. And here Data Analysts and Data Scientists work. This post doesn’t touch the second task – Data Analyzing, but still speaking of data extraction and of data processing in general, it is impossible not to mention such an issue.
Data sources and data owners
The World Wide Web, as was stated above, is a huge and almost infinite source of data. Every day and every second it is being fulfilled with new chunks of a data. And there are a number of involved parties who desire to get their own share of the data pie. Leaving out the governmental agencies wishing to control data flow and aggregate all of them in their hands there are still a lot of business entities having a great share of a data before them. IT-giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, WordPress and so on release the products making them possible to aggregate a huge amount of a digital info from around the world. Moreover, there is no secret, the Google, for example has its own trackers on a huge amount of third-party websites. That makes them possible to collect data not only from sources they behold (e.g. YouTube, Google-accounts, Google-maps, Android-devices and so on), that makes them possible to collect data from almost every segment of a World Wide Web including governmental pages throughout the world.
Where to start collect data?
However, the question is still open – if you are not a governmental agency or an IT-giant, where to start for data collection? There are a lot of ways, methods and solutions. A site owner can, for example, to install analytics system, such as Google Analytics to get some knowledge about his site’s visitors behavior and preferences. In theory, you may even get some data about your competitors’ sites visitors by getting one way or another analytics system data from their pages. But all these ways are insufficient, barely legal and have a number of disadvantages. The major one is – you’re constantly tied with many restrictions and lack of understanding how does that “black box” you have been acquired exactly work.
Scraping solutions
The other approach is – to hold everything in your hands. To get data you need and where you need from. Enough dependence from third-parties! No more restrictions and lack of flexibility! Scraping products let you do the data collection more versatile and sophisticated. If you are a developer you can create your own solution or pick the most fit for you between market offers.
Web-scraping (also called web-harvesting, data extraction) is a computer technique allowing you to parse through an open HTML code and gather any info you require. Usually these data have a great, even a huge volume, so their processing is exclusively machine work. The manual processing of such a data will be much slower and much more expensive. This way collected data could be transformed into easy-to-read format such JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Comma-Separated Values (CSV), but could also be imported into any database you desire.
Most often web-sources being scraped for getting marketplaces prices, travel fares, SERP-data, customers reviews, social activities like shares, likes, reactions and so on, giving a great opportunity for anyone to carry out his marketing and competitors researches, SEO-monitoring and many other activities.
Involved areas
This technique are regularly applied for a various marketing researches. If you wish to know an actual prices, range of your competitors products, availability of goods – all that is possible with a web-scraping. All that makes you know your market better and makes you more efficient personally and more efficient as a business fueling you up and giving you insightful stream of data. Moreover, you can not only monitor your competitors, you even always may be one step ahead of them by getting knowledge of market trends providing outstanding opportunities for your business.
The other particular using of a web-scraping is a price aggregation. No matter, if you have travel agency, booking agency or a service for retailers prices comparison – web-scraping is a crucial and vital for your business. In such a case there is quite important to get constantly actual and most complete stream of data.
It is also crucial for SEO-specialists in their work, as they need to know and track the changes in websites rankings. The best way for it – is monitoring and studying SERP-data. Having such a set of data allows them to understand how the search ranging works and what they should to do to get better positions.
Yet another possible area of a web-scraping applications – is the customer reviews monitoring. Monitoring social networks, review aggregators, Twitter – all that allows you to always stay in touch with your customer, quickly respond to and meet his needs. Revealing negative feedback in time and quick response to it – is also the crucial part of a marketers work. But don’t forget – having only positive reactions is in many cases the same as having only negative feedback.
The competitors research is another perfect way for such implementations. All above-mentioned ways of application can be put not only into your area, but equally into your competitors area. All their open source code could be at your disposal, revealing you strengths and weaknesses you can take advantage of.
Less common but not less crucial issue is a brand protection. There is no secret: each brand requires tracking counterfeits, illegal logos and trademarks use. The copyright owners have to be aware of any infringements and copyright violations. Then, it’s quite important to remove all unauthorized content and services, fake social networks accounts and so on – web-scraping helps to realize all that in easier and more comfortable way.
Sales intelligence is a quite good option to expand your customers base. Phone numbers, emails, any other contacts are the valuable, perhaps the priceless info for any Sales Dep and such a job is not impossible for web-scrapers.
Web-scraping isn’t always appropriate
When using web-scrapers you should remember: they are not always desirable software for many web-services and web-sites. Quite often it violates User Agreements and Terms of Service for some web sources and sites. One of the reasons for it – is a great number of HTTP-request that may cause their malfunctions or even lead to the crash. The other reason is that the information being collected isn’t always intended for such a collection. For example, harvesting of contact or personal data may be interpreted as serious violation. All that, normally, would lead to the IP-ban and the denial to the source access.
To resolve such an issue web scrapers should use proxy-servers. That helps mask your real IP-address and not to be banned on this or that web-service.
Proxy types and sorts of tasks they help complete
There are some types of proxy-servers: mobile proxies, residential proxies, datacenter proxies, ISP-proxies. The two major types web-scrapers use for their functioning are residential and datacenter proxies. The main difference of residential from datacenter proxies – the first ones look like real IPs, so web-server «see» them as if a real people visit the web-site. It makes harder for anti-scraping software to detect the scraping is performed, so there is less probably the web-scraper would be banned. Of course, IP-address itself, even residential, cannot guarantee you won’t be banned, but in combo with an additional software like antidetect browsers, for example, it enhances your chances not to be blocked.
But you shouldn’t have misunderstanding the datacenter proxies are useless and are being compromised whenever you decide using them. The routine tasks such as standard marketing research may be well performed using datacenter proxies, even using so called semi-dedicated proxies – proxies being used by several users (more often - two or three). But if you have the task for multi-accounting or something like that – the residential proxies are more fit for such tasks.
All that was said about residential and datacenter proxies, all that concerned mainly private proxies provided for some fee. But speaking of proxy-servers there is impossible not to say about so-called public proxies. Public proxies are free proxies which is suitable for some tasks like locks bypass and so on. However, they are incapable to solve any more challenging issue.
Legal issues
Finishing up with a talk about web-scraping and its possible using there is not impossible not to say about some its legal issues. Depending on what and according to your local laws web-scraping could fall under certain legal provisions such as: Copyright law violation, digital trespass, misappropriation law, violation of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and so on.
But still the web-scraping itself is not illegal and its using requires qualified legal advice.
Conclusion
Web-scraping solutions become the more and more popular among all those who wish to respond the challenges of modern market conditions. But having the web-scraper only is not enough: you will also need reliable and proven provider of proxy infrastructure. Moreover, all that activity should be coordinated with a legal conditions according to your local legislative acts.
Following those two points will ensure you can successfully go through all bottlenecks and acquire powerful and sophisticated tool for your business prosperity.
We wish you good luck and always be one step ahead of your competitors! From our part we can guarantee all our services and all our team will do their best to contribute to it! We thank you for your attention and until new meetings here!