What is data scraping?
Scraping is the technique used to extract a large amount of data from different websites to expand competition research, plan marketing strategies, or do some SEO monitoring. This process can be performed manually or automatically and it is commonly used among small, mid-level, and large companies. Web scraping plays a significant role in the data industry.
Data scraping process
The web scraping process can be explained in three simple steps:
- Request – Response
You request the target website and in response, you receive the desired data in HTML format. - Parse and Extract
The code from text format is translated to a structure understandable by computers. - Download
The downloaded data will be saved in JSON, CSV, or a database format for future analysis.
The benefits of data scraping
You can extract, aggregate, convert and save any form of data in order to analyze it later.
Scraping web data might be really helpful in growing your business due to:
- lead generation,
- brand monitoring,
- ad verification,
- market research,
- marketing automation.
Data scraping without getting blocked
Scraping data and converting it to a structured format seems easy, but in fact, it’s quite tricky due to numerous websites blocking their IPs constantly. Besides the obvious solution, which is scraping in intervals in order not to get blocked, you should use a proxy server like MonkeyProxy, which is a layer between you and the target website, that hides your IP address from the target web server.
