The business models are changing nowadays. Business owners are now taking their business online so that they can target a huge audience for their products and services. You can check out your competitors’ sites and you can check out the data. Getting the data of your competitors will help you understand the market and mold your online strategy accordingly.
Gathering data from different websites can be time-consuming when it is done manually. This is when the role of different scraping tools comes in.
Why Are People Performing Web Scraping?
There are many reasons why people perform web scraping. Let’s take a look at some major reasons why people are performing web scraping:
Competitor Price Monitoring
Price plays a crucial role in any business. With the increase in competition in eCommerce, the price has been very competitive. To make sure your products are priced correctly, you need to monitor the pricing of your competitors. So with the help of a good tool, you can do price scraping.
Fetching Images & Product Descriptions
Another major reason why people are performing web scraping is to fetch images and product descriptions from their competitors’ websites. It helps to get more idea about the products of your competitors.
So many industries require web scraping
Do you know around 54 different industries require web scraping masters? Among different industries, the top industries are computer software, information technology & services, financial services, and internet industries.
Tracking the latest trends
People also use web or data scraping for tracking the latest trends around the world. For the people involved in media or communication, website scraping is very important. It helps to know what’s trending and what’s happening in various circles in the industry.
Benefits of Automatic Web Scraping with the Use of Tools
As we have seen, web scraping plays a crucial role in various industries. The objective of any scraping tool is to gather data from a particular site and send it into a downloadable file. Here are some of the major benefits of automatic web scraping with the usage of different tools:
Time-Saving
The main reason why people from different industries prefer using good web data extractor is that it is really helpful in saving time. If we compare both methods i.e., web scraping manually and with automation tools, the use of a good scraping tool saves a lot of time and energy.
Cost-effective
Another great thing about using an automated website scraping tools rather than doing the process manually is it helps to save a good amount of money. When you plan to do the process manually, you have to hire a professional company for the task. With the help of a site scraping tool, the tasks will be automated and there will be no need to spend money on hiring a professional company.
Get accurate & detailed data
By getting a good scraping tool, you would be able to get accurate and detailed data. The best thing is you get the desired data accurately and in detail, in very less time. Let say, if you have an eCommerce store and you want to analyze your competitors. With the help of a data scraping tool, you will gather precise data with all the necessary information.
You can perform the scraping process automatically, You do not have to worry about spending your time on gathering the data. Different scraping tools allow automating the entire process of data scraping.
Benefits of Free vs Paid Private Proxies for Web Scraping
When you do web scraping, you need to get a good quality proxy. The reason behind this is to maintain anonymity and keep your identity a secret. When it comes to proxies for web scraping, they can be free or paid. Both, free and paid proxies have their own pros and cons. Let’s talk about the benefits of these two types of proxies for web scraping:
Free Proxies
The important thing to keep in mind is free proxies are not actually free. Companies don’t provide their services for free. When the product is provided for free to users, it means the actual user is the product. We don’t actually recommend our readers to go with free proxies, because in most cases, your data will not be safe.
In short, you should avoid using free proxies for important projects so that you can protect security. The benefit of this kind of proxies is they are free, companies don’t charge any amount for their service. You may consider using free proxies when you are not working on an important project.
Paid Proxies
When it comes to paid proxies, you have two options, you can go with shared proxies or you can go with private proxies. No matter whether you choose shared or private proxy, both provide better security than free proxies. As you are paying money for the service, the performance you will get would be far better than the performance of free proxies.
Paid proxies successfully hide your identity and maintain anonymity. It allows you to hide your IP address. Apart from this, the connection speed you will get with a shared or dedicated proxy would be better than the free proxy.
Free and paid, both proxies have their own pros and cons. The major advantage of free proxies is companies don’t charge any amount for their service. And, the major advantage of paid proxies is they provide better performance and great overall experience.
Tools That Can Be Used For Web Scraping
So here we can see that web scraping can be used for various purposes. There are many web scraping tools available. Make sure you select the right tool so that you can get a better experience. Here are some tools that can be used for web scraping:
ParseHub
ParseHub has both, free and premium plans. It is a web-based scraping tool, built to crawl single and multiple websites. With the help of this tool, you can gather data from your competitors’ websites. The advanced technology of ParseHub gathers data and sends it to your desired output format. The free version of ParseHub has limitations on a number of projects and pages.
If you want to create more projects, you have to go with the premium version.
Outwit
Outwit is another tool, designed to extract data from different web pages. It can be boring and time-consuming to collect all the data manually. Using this tool, you can automate your tasks and just relax. After automating, the tool will do all its tasks, you just have to wait and watch. It allows you to find, grab, and organize all the collected data & media.
Octoparse
Octoparse is another popular web scraping tool out there. The tool allows you to gather data without any prior knowledge of coding. It can extract both, dynamic and static websites. The cloud services of Octoparse allows gathering data in huge amount. Depending on your preferences, you can convert the data into your desired file format.
So if you want to conduct the competitors’ analyses for your online business, you should consider using a good website scraping tool. Using a web data extractor helps to collect and organize the data faster. And make sure you choose a high-quality paid proxy for the web scraping process.