Nowadays, businesses breathe in the age of big data. Hence, companies need to understand now more than ever that to ground an ambitious, competitive advantage, data harvesting is essential.

Tag along to discover what you need to know before choosing a data extraction tool that can empower your business or project. But first, let’s start with a brief explanatory part of the most important terms when it comes to web scraping.

With efficient and effortless data harvesting, here comes web scraping and APIs

Many see web data gathering as a scary process that requires advanced technological expertise and a giant tech stack. In reality, there are a few ingenious, efficient and quite easy ways to collect large amounts of data in no time. The public’s most valuable candidate is web scraping.

Scenario: Regardless of your occupation or field of activity, let’s say you need to obtain a considerable quantity of data from various websites. What do you do? Go!

One possibility could be to review each website and manually cut and paste every piece of information required. Or better yet, you could assign a web scraper to do all the heavy lifting.

By a general definition, web scraping is a faster and more convenient method of extracting data from a website or particular webpage.

After the data is collected, it is usually converted into a more handy format, such as an Excel spreadsheet.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It refers to a series of procedures and communication protocols that enable users to access data stored in a program, operating system, or other facilities.

The main reason to use an API is to make it easier to develop new programs that use the same data.

For instance, a news aggregator might build an API that would enable other developers to access their data set and do whatever they wanted with it, such as create a news app, blog or research studies.

Web scraping using an API: what are the advantages?

Because it is a more sophisticated and customisable method, a web scraper will definitely save you lots of time by collecting data at a vaster volume than an individual could ever dream of achieving.

The business decision-making process empowers a significant impact on a company’s future in the market. Generating new ideas often requires additional measures, such as facts and evidence about competition, user reviews and the market landscape.

Web scraping is essentially an invaluable decision-making tool for gathering the knowledge demanded to support management in making wise and outstanding decisions.

The volume of data one can receive from the Internet is tremendous, such as text, images, videos and numerical data of any kind. Using a web scraper system, you can create custom datasets for analysis, depending on your goal.

All this vital information gathered with a web scraper might have a great impact on business growth. The main areas where such a process is highly appreciated are:

As the popularity of this genius data and information extraction grows, some companies are also trying their best to keep blocking scrapers to obtain their data with no fuss.

Therefore, finding the best web scraper suited for your needs can be a delicate task. You should know which advantages the chosen software should possess, and to do that, you need to be aware of the most common problem a web scraper usually encounters:

Detection: Websites can distinguish web crawlers from real users by tracking a browsers’ activity, checking the IP address, setting honeypots, attaching CAPTCHAs, or even restricting the request rate.

The following list aims to help you paint a reliable overview of the most charming attributes a Web-Scraper-Prince should have to prevent being noticed and blocked.

Because a scraper can visit a website a hundred times per day, it may trigger scraper identification software to flag inappropriate browsing behaviour, resulting in an IP ban.

Therefore, it would be most beneficial to use a proxy server to keep your scraper anonymous by keeping the original IP address hidden.

A proxy serves as a go-between for you and the Internet. When you use a proxy server, the request is filtered through the proxy server first (changing your IP address) and only after it reaches the website.

A strong proxy pool is an essential feature that manages to prevent getting banned quickly by intelligently rotating the IPs used for requests.

Choosing the right type of proxy is only the tip of the iceberg. Even though by using a proxy the probability of being detected is comparatively low, the threat still exists. Therefore, the quality of a proxy pool can be determined by how often you get caught.

Residential IP Proxy: For those who want to make sure they never get blocked, a residential IP proxy is the best fit. This proxy type comes only with legitimate IP addresses that will make it look like a real person is browsing the website, keeping bot detectors calm and unaware.

Mobile IPs: As proxies work as a “tunnel” between web scrapers and websites, the mobile proxy protects the web scraping bot’s IP address and location, allowing it to resemble an anonymous individual. Moreover, proxies defend the scraper by making it look like the requests are coming from a mobile device.

Datacenter IPs: Datacenter IPs is the usually recommended solution for most cases. What makes it a good option is that it provides the best results at the lowest cost. These IPs offer comparable results to residential proxies or mobile IPs but without legal concerns.

Around the globe, geotargeting allows you to access geo-restricted content. If you wish to gather information from a website that grants content targeted for the UK public only, a proxy server will cover that. You can also choose any location of your preference if offered by your selected proxy service.

One of the most effective ways to protect your scraper from getting blocked is to use rotating proxies. This approach offers you a consequential collection of IPs to scrape. By performing so, it will prevent sending too many requests using the same IP address.

When compared to plain HTML pages, the Javascript rendering process is slightly more complex. If we were to use a standard requests package to a website built with the Javascript framework, the answers that are returned will be empty. That’s because original data is obtained only after the rendering process.

So, to not be restricted by the type of data you want to collect, the chosen web scraper should be familiar with Javascript rendering.

A fingerprint is all the data a website can gather about your web browser and computer. Trust us. There is more information than you might imagine. And even if you address your browser fingerprint, websites might still manage to identify you as the same user.

To help bypass bot detection, you will need to have an individual fingerprint discoverable by the website for every visitor you are trying to create.

The only task left for you: decide what suits you best

No one could argue that choosing the best web scraping API for your particular needs can be a confusing process, even for tech-heads. We hope that this guide helped you to create a reliable overview of what you should be looking for in a web scraper.

However, if you think you need extra information, we recommend 10 Best Web Scraping APIs. This article will help you decide on the ideal web scraping services provider for all your web scraping desires, based on each advantage we briefly named in this one.

Gather the correctly filtered information for your web scraping projects right now!

How to Choose the Best Scraping API for Your Needs

When considering a brand’s prosperity, it goes without saying that research is vital for understanding the market panorama and revealing its authentic qualities, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Even though for some it is intuitively obvious that acting or relying entirely on assumptions is a lousy way to make business decisions, many organizations are still skipping or superficially handling this crucial step. The question is why.

Simply put, the most influential enemies of a job well done are, in a great majority of cases, time and budget constraints. And this is precisely where web scrapers come into the picture.

This article will cover the whys and how web scraping can monitor, manage and help your brand generate a competitive advantage.

Important things to know about web scraping

Imagine you need a list of your business competitors, which must include items like names, prices, and customer reviews.

If you are like any other human being, you will probably start by opening a considerable amount of tabs in your browser, a new page for each competitor.

Next, the natural thing to do is start centralizing the data gathered using a table of some kind. You will manually visit each link, searching for the desired information. And this is ok.

But what if your business had thousands of competitors? Copy and paste is undoubtedly not the most effective and quick way to obtain large amounts of data.

A web scraper is basically the digital intern assigned to quickly and accurately help you extract a massive amount of information available on the Internet. Scraping converts disorganized data into organized and manageable data that can be stored and analyzed.

If there are still some questions unanswered, check out this article about All You Need to Know About Web Scraping. And a Little More.

Due to its cost-efficient advantage, multiple industries could benefit from using web scraping to grow wealthier businesses. Let’s look briefly at common uses that usually require most of our attention:

Market Research: Through web scraping, businesses can reach precious and insightful web data that can be a significant turning point in business decisions.

Price and Product Intelligence: Assembling information about competitors’ prices is a popular practice to secure business growth and continuity.

Lead Generation: Businesses use web scraping for finding websites with multiple contacts because possessing access to a potential customer list is a great competitive advantage.

Competitor Analysis: Because of the high number of competitors that offer slightly different services, with different prices and approaches, keeping a digital eye on them is a life changer.

Brand Monitoring: We will discuss this in more detail below.

Real Estate: To name a few benefits, web scrapers can help with evaluating property value, observing vacancy rates, assessing rental yields, forecasting market direction

Financing and Investing: When discussing financial data, a web scraper helps you extract insights from SEC filings, estimate company fundamentals, overview public sentiment, and monitor the trends.

To stimulate user loyalty and differentiate from competitors, brands strive now more than ever to accurately deliver what customers expect and even more. Therefore, every step a brand should make in the business world begins with a solid foundation of research.

Brand monitoring is a fundamental check-up routine that secures whether the product or service fits your target market’s needs. The process can be broadly automated.

Because a web scraper collects information much faster, it’s much easier to gather and calculate public opinion, compare it with past reports, identify trends, and have a holistic view of customers, opinions, tastes, and preferences.

How to use the power of web scraping to grow your brand

Collect customer feedback to identify the brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Thanks to the Internet, we have access to platforms where people willingly share their experiences. Some examples could be social media and forums.

Get actionable-insights from the competition to identify and analyze both ups and downs of their strategies. Now, you can learn from their failures and blunders and explore areas of growth for your brand.

Customers’ reviews are the core of a business’s survival and maturity. Unluckily, receiving fake reviews is not uncommon. It’s something many companies have encountered one way or another. Nonetheless, dealing with them should wear the priority badge.

Web scraping helps you understand where your brand stands in the market among competitors. Determining an optimal pricing strategy is essential to set an offer price that can maximize revenue and deliver solid profit.

We live in a digital era. And users surely know how to take advantage of it by researching a brand’s values and products before deciding on a purchase. Therefore, it is vital for modern companies to get a crystal clear image of their online presence.

Deep insights about your brand’s popularity can be obtained from current customer expressions on social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

When it comes to web scraping, the options available on the market are so numerous that you would probably need a scraper to find the perfect scraper that meets your needs.

For those who want to get rid of the classic and challenging process of collecting data, WebScrapingAPI offers a reliable, customizable, and easy-to-use solution by simply creating a free account.

Learn more about our product and start your journey with 1000 free API calls!

To sum up, you need to gather valuable data in order to develop new strategies for your brand to shine. All of this falls back to two matters: financial resources and time.

By using a web scraper, one can efficiently collect all the information required for comprehensive brand monitoring in order to:

Customize and increase market penetration

This was just one example of how web scraping can help businesses get a leg up and achieve better results. Up for another example? Check out how data extraction can be used to research your competitors.

Valentina Dumitrescu