How Web Scraping can Help you Detect Weak spots in your Business

How Web Scraping can Help you Detect Weak spots in your Business

Business intelligence is not a new term. Businesses have always been employing experts for analysing the progress, market and industry trends to keep their growth graph going up. Now that we have big data and the tool to gather this data – Web scraping, business intelligence has become even more fruitful. In fact, business intelligence has become a necessary thing to survive now that the competition is fierce in every industry. This is the reason why most enterprises depend on web scraping solutions to gather the data relevant to their businesses. This data is highly insightful and dependable enough to make critical business decisions. Business intelligence from web scraping is definitely a game changer for companies as it can supply relevant and actionable data with minimal effort.

Most businesses have weak spots that are being overlooked or hidden from the plain sight. These weak spots, if left unnoticed can gradually result in the downfall of your company. Here is how you can use data acquired through web scraping to detect weak spots in your business and strengthen them.

Competitor analysis

Many a times, you can find out the flaws in your business by keeping a close watch on your competitors. Competitor analysis is something that we owe to web scraping as the level of competitive intelligence that you can derive from web scraping has never been achievable in the past. With crawling forums and social media sites where your target audience is, you can easily find out if your competitor is leveraging something you have overlooked. Competitor analysis is all about staying updated to each and every action by your competitors, so that you can always be prepared for their next strategic move. If your competitors are doing better than you, this data can be used to make a comparison between your business and theirs which would give you insights on where you lack.

Brand monitoring on Social media

With social media platforms acting like platforms where businesses and customers can interact with each other, the data available on these sites are increasingly becoming relevant to businesses. Any issues in your business operations will also reflect on your customer sentiments. Social media is a goldmine of sentiment data that can help you detect issues within your company. By analysing the posts that mention your brand or product on social media sites, you can identify what department of your company is functioning well and what isn’t.

For example, if you are an Ecommerce portal and many users are complaining about delivery issues from your company on social media, you might want to switch to a better logistics partner who does a better job. The ability to identify such issues at the earliest is extremely important and that’s where web scraping becomes a life saver. With social media scraping, monitoring your brand on social media is easy like never before and the chances of minor issues escalating to bigger ones is almost non-existent. Brand monitoring is extremely crucial if you are a business operating in the online space. Social media scraping solutions are provided by many leading web scraping companies, which totally eliminates the technical complications associated with the process for you.

Finding untapped opportunities

There are always new and untapped markets and opportunities that are relevant to your business. Finding them is not going to be an easy task with manual and outdated methods of research. Web scraping can fill this gap and help you find opportunities that your company can make use of to leverage your reach and progress. Sometimes, targeting the right audience makes all the difference that you’ve been trying to make. By using web crawling to find mentions of your relevant keywords on the web, you can easily stay updated on your niche and fill in to any new untapped markets. Web crawling for keywords is better explained in our previous blog.

Bottom line

It is not a cakewalk to stay ahead in the competition considering how competitive every industry has become in this digital age. It is crucial to find the weak spots and untapped opportunities of your business before someone else does. Of course, you can always use some help from the technology when you need it. Web scraping is clearly the best way to find and gather data that would help you figure these out. With web crawling solutions that can completely take care of this niche process, nothing is stopping you from using the data and insights that the web has in stock for your business.

Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/web-scraping-detect-weak-spots-business

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

How Web Data Extraction Services Will Save Your Time and Money by Automatic Data Collection

Data scrape is the process of extracting data from web by using software program from proven website only. Extracted data any one can use for any purposes as per the desires in various industries as the web having every important data of the world. We provide best of the web data extracting software. We have the expertise and one of kind knowledge in web data extraction, image scrapping, screen scrapping, email extract services, data mining, web grabbing.

Who can use Data Scraping Services?

Data scraping and extraction services can be used by any organization, company, or any firm who would like to have a data from particular industry, data of targeted customer, particular company, or anything which is available on net like data of email id, website name, search term or anything which is available on web. Most of time a marketing company like to use data scraping and data extraction services to do marketing for a particular product in certain industry and to reach the targeted customer for example if X company like to contact a restaurant of California city, so our software can extract the data of restaurant of California city and a marketing company can use this data to market their restaurant kind of product. MLM and Network marketing company also use data extraction and data scrapping services to to find a new customer by extracting data of certain prospective customer and can contact customer by telephone, sending a postcard, email marketing, and this way they build their huge network and build large group for their own product and company.

We helped many companies to find particular data as per their need for example.

Web Data Extraction

Web pages are built using text-based mark-up languages (HTML and XHTML), and frequently contain a wealth of useful data in text form. However, most web pages are designed for human end-users and not for ease of automated use. Because of this, tool kits that scrape web content were created. A web scraper is an API to extract data from a web site. We help you to create a kind of API which helps you to scrape data as per your need. We provide quality and affordable web Data Extraction application

Data Collection

Normally, data transfer between programs is accomplished using info structures suited for automated processing by computers, not people. Such interchange formats and protocols are typically rigidly structured, well-documented, easily parsed, and keep ambiguity to a minimum. Very often, these transmissions are not human-readable at all. That's why the key element that distinguishes data scraping from regular parsing is that the output being scraped was intended for display to an end-user.

Email Extractor

A tool which helps you to extract the email ids from any reliable sources automatically that is called a email extractor. It basically services the function of collecting business contacts from various web pages, HTML files, text files or any other format without duplicates email ids.

Screen scrapping

Screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text information from a computer display terminal's screen and collecting visual data from a source, instead of parsing data as in web scraping.

Data Mining Services

Data Mining Services is the process of extracting patterns from information. Datamining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform the data into information. Any format including MS excels, CSV, HTML and many such formats according to your requirements.

Web spider

A Web spider is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Many sites, in particular search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

Web Grabber

Web grabber is just a other name of the data scraping or data extraction.

Web Bot

Web Bot is software program that is claimed to be able to predict future events by tracking keywords entered on the Internet. Web bot software is the best program to pull out articles, blog, relevant website content and many such website related data We have worked with many clients for data extracting, data scrapping and data mining they are really happy with our services we provide very quality services and make your work data work very easy and automatic.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

Web Scraping Best Practices

Web Scraping Best Practices

Extracting data from the World Wide Web has several challenges as more webmasters are working day and night to lower cases of scraping and crawling of their data in order to survive in the competitive world. There are various other problems you may face when web scraping and most of them can be avoided by adapting and implementing certain web scraping best practices as discussed in this article.

Have knowledge of the scraping tools

Acquiring adequate knowledge of hurdles that may be encountered during web scraping, you will be able to have a smooth web scraping experience and be on the safe side of the law. Conduct a thorough research on the types of tools you will use for scraping and crawling. Firsthand knowledge on these tools will help you find the data you need without being blocked.

Proper proxy software that acts as the middle party works well when you know how to work around HTTP and HTML protocols. Use tools that can change crawling patterns, URLs and data retrieved even when you are crawling on one domain. This will help you abide to the rules and regulations that come with web scraping activities and escaping any legal issues.
Conduct your scraping activities during off-peak hours

You may opt to extract data during times that less people have access for instance over the weekends, during late night hours, public holidays among others. Visiting a website on several instances to retrieve the same type of data is a waste of bandwidth. It is always advisable to download the entire site content to your computer and thereafter you can access it whenever need arises.
Hide your scrapping activities

There is a thin line between ethical and unethical crawling hence you should completely evade being on the top user list of a particular website. Cover up your track as best as you can by making use of proxy IPs to avoid any legal problems. You may also use multiple IP addresses or VPN services to conceal your scrapping activities and lower chances of landing on a website’s blacklist.

Website owners today are very protective of their data and any other information existing under their unique url. Be keen when going through the terms and conditions indicated by websites as they may consider crawling as an infringement of their privacy. Simple etiquette goes a long way. Your web scraping efforts will be fruitful if the site owner supports the idea of sharing data.
Keep record of your activities

Web scraping involves large amount of data.Due to this you may not always remember each and every piece of information you have acquired, gathering statistics will help you monitor your activities.
Load data in phases

Web scraping demands a lot of patience from you when using the crawlers to get needed information. Take the process in a slow manner by loading data one piece at a time. Several parallel request to the same domain can crush the entire site or retrace the scrapping attempts back to your local machine.

Loading data small bits will save you the hustle of scrapping afresh in case that your activity has been interrupted because you will have already stored part of the data required. You can reduce the loading data on an individual domain through various techniques such as caching pages that you have scrapped to escape redundancy occurrences. Use auto throttling mechanisms to increase the amount of traffic to the website and pause for breaks between requests to prevent getting banned.
Conclusion

Through these few mentioned web scraping best practices you will be able to work around website and gather the data required as per clients’ request without major hurdles along the way. The ultimate goal of every web scraper is to be able to access vital information and at the same time remain on the good side of the law.

Source: http://nocodewebscraping.com/web-scraping-best-practices/

Invest in Data Extraction to Grow Your Business

Invest in Data Extraction to Grow Your Business

Automating your employees’ processes can help you increase productivity while keeping the cost of used resources at a minimum. This can help you focus your time and money in much needed areas of your company so that you can thrive in your industry. Data extraction can help you achieve automation by targeting online data sources (websites, blogs, forums, etc) for information and data that can be useful to your business. By using software rather than your employees, you can oftentimes get more accurate data and more thorough information that people may miss. The software can handle the volume that you need and will deliver the results that you desire to help your company.
See the Power of Data Extraction Online

To see all of the ways that data extraction tools and software can benefit your business, visit Connotate.com. There you can read about the features of the software, practical uses for businesses and also schedule a demo before you buy.

Source: http://www.connotate.com/invest-in-data-extraction-to-grow-your-business/

Best Alternative For Linkedin Data Scraping

Best Alternative For Linkedin Data Scraping

When I started my career in sales, one of the things that my VP of sales told me is that ” In sales, assumptions are the mother of all f**k ups “. I know the F word sounds a bit inappropriate, but that is the exact word he used. He was trying to convey the simple point that every prospect is different, so don’t guess, use data to come up with decisions.

I joined Datahut and we are working on a product that helps sales people. I thought I should discuss it with you guys and take your feedback.

Let me tell you how the idea evolved itself. At Datahut, we get to hear a lot of problems customers want to solve. Almost 30 percent of all the inbound leads ask us to help them with lead generation.

Most of them simply ask, “Can you scrape Linkedin for me”?

Every time, we politely refused.

But not anymore, we figured out a way to solve their problem without scraping Linkedin.

This should raise some questions in your mind.

1) What problem is he trying to solve?– Most of the time their sales team does not have the accurate data about the prospects. This leads to a total chaos. It will end up in a waste of both time and money by selling the leads that are not sales qualified.

2) Why do they need data specifically from Linkedin? – LinkedIn is the world’s largest business network. In his view, there is no better place to find leads for his business than Linkedin. It is right in a way.

3) Ok, then what is wrong in scraping Linkedin? – Scraping Linkedin is against its terms and it can lead to legal issues. Linkedin has an excellent anti-scraping mechanism which can make the scraping costly.

4) How severe is the problem? – The problem has a direct impact on the revenues as the productivity of the sales team is too low. Without enough sales, the company is a joke.

5) Is there a better way? – Of course yes. The people with profiles in LinkedIn are in other sites too. eg. Google plus, CrunchBase etc. If we can mine and correlate the data, we can generate leads with rich information. It will have better quality than scraping LinkedIn.

6) What to do when the machine intelligence fails? – We have to use human intelligence. Period!

Datahut is working on a platform that can help you get leads that match your ideal buyer persona. It will be a complete Business intelligence platform powered by machine and human intelligence for an efficient lead research & discovery.We named it Leadintel. We’ve also established some partnerships that help to enrich the data and saves the trouble of lawsuits.

We are opening our platform for beta users. You can request an invitation using the contact form. What do you think about this? What are your suggestions?

Thanks for reading this blog post. Datahut offers affordable data extraction services (DaaS) . If you need help with your web scraping projects let us know and we will be glad to help.

Source:http://blog.datahut.co/best-alternative-for-linkedin-data-scraping/