Which Are The 4 Web Scraping Projects Will Help You Automate Your Life?
Businesses can use web scraping to improve their products or services, thus offering higher customer satisfaction. Businesses can boost productivity, extract accurate data, and save crucial resources by opting for web scraping and automation.
Web scraping is an important method that helps organizations gather vital data from various websites. Businesses can use web scraping to improve their products or services, thus offering higher customer satisfaction. When clubbed with machine learning and automation, this tool can save businesses plenty of time as they can scrape critical data from other websites faster. In short, businesses can boost productivity, extract accurate data, and save crucial resources by opting for web scraping and automation.
1. How does web scraping work?
Web scraping is a method of extracting large amounts of data from different websites worldwide. The data is collected from an unstructured HTML format and is exported or converted into a more usable format, such as a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet. Web scraping can be accomplished using these three simple steps
Request Data: Your web scraper can request data collection from the target website. The data is collected in an HTML format, which needs further processing.
Extraction: The HTML data needs to be parsed or converted from one format to another and then extracted into a usable format, such as links, paragraphs, titles, etc.
Download and Save: Finally, the extracted data is downloaded and stored in the desired format, which companies can access anytime later. One can retrieve and implement the saved data in various programs as and when required.
The entire web scraping process is mainly automated, and there can be numerous ways of extracting data. For example, companies can use online services that use particular APIs or create codes from scratch to extract the required data.
2. How to effectively use automation in web scraping?
A responsible web scraper can automate anything in your business and can extract your desired content from a web page to use in your portal or software. However, the role of web scrapers continues after data collection and structuring information - they can also use data to maintain your brand image and the company's online reputation.
The following methods may help you to use automation effectively while scraping websites:
Define the Data: Before beginning the extraction process, you need to figure out what kind of data you may need to reach a goal. Identify which data you may require on priority and from what kind of web pages.
List Your Products: It may be hard to accomplish this step manually, but a crawler bot or software may come to the rescue. Creating an Excel file of all the product listings along with their web page URLs may speed up this step.
Automate Using Coding: Hire a programmer to help you automate the data extraction process using automation tools and an efficient language like Python.
Export: As mentioned earlier, the best files to export all your data are Excel and CSV, as they make your data usage. You can later implement the data into your lead generation processes or integrate it into your PIM (Product Information Management) solution.
In other words, automation can help web scrapers extract the right amount of data within a minimal time to help the company stay ahead of the competition.
3. How to use web scraping for lead generation?
Now that we know how powerful the web scraping and automation duo can be for boosting your company's success, let's look at how you can generate potential and good-quality leads for your business.
Identifying Sources: First and foremost, you need to identify your target website, where you can find valuable data regarding your target audience and industry trends. For example, let's say you want to extract data on your social media prospects, the source of your target market, their behavioural or purchasing patterns, and so on. You need to find the right websites to provide this information. Ensure to collect vital details like the potential buyer's profile, social media links, company bio, contact info, etc.
Determining the Extraction Method: Next, you need to hire a professional web scraper to help you determine the proper data extraction process. Numerous web scraping methods include HTML Parsing, Vertical Aggregation, Report Mining, Screen Scraping, and others. Discuss with your web scraper which method would work best for your company to grow more valuable leads.
Structuring Your Extracted Data: Now it's time to format your extracted data and convert the unstructured HTML information into an Excel file. You can fine-tune your data by filtering out only the data you need on priority and saving useful information in a readable format. Then, the data is ready for analysis to be further implemented and integrated with other lead generation or product management software.
4. The four essential projects of web scraping that will help automate your life.
Imagine how life will be easier if we automate repetitive and monotonous tasks. We can save time and money while also ensuring that the derived results are accurate. By learning the skill of efficient web scraping, we can create bots that can perform our day-to-day tasks and offer more personalized solutions.
Repetitive Task Automation
To begin with, find a web scraping solution that offers the easiest code, such as a beginner-friendly Python library. Then, write a web scraper script using Python and extract the title and body content from any web page or article, such as blog posts, news articles, etc. Next, you need to extract all this data in a .txt file (converted from HTML) and name it as the title of the article you are extracting.
Some tasks you can perform through automation include posting on social media regularly, sending emails or SMS messages to clients and prospects, ordering food online, etc. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning; you can automate the scraping of multiple web pages within minutes!
Sports Analytics Automation (For Instance, Scraping Football Data)
Many of you may have visited websites during the FIFA 2022 season (or any other sports) to get live scores and other stats like player performances, previous match highlights, etc. How many of you would sign up for a system that can offer you this data automatically after every match?
If you are up for this, the second project aims to scrape a sports website that would include all your desired stats of your favourite sport. You may find such a site easily since this data is generally included in a table format. Hence, extracting this information in a convenient CSV format would be easier to get readable insights anytime, even after years.
Job Portal Scraping/Automation of Job Hunting
We know how challenging job-hunting procedures may become, especially when you hear the commonly said statement, "We will let you know!" However, with web scraping and automation, you can make job searches easier by scurrying through multiple web pages containing job offers. You can quickly scan the job requirements, salary range, and application criteria to determine your areas of interest. This saves you time spent applying for the wrong jobs and performing tedious job search processes like writing a job title, clicking on the 'Apply' button, going through each job post, and so on.
Scraping for Product Prices to Obtain the Best Price
While shopping is one of the favourite pastimes for some, it can be pretty time-consuming, especially when you need more time between multiple product choices. Everybody loves to have the best deal out there, and for that, web scraping would be the solution to save all those hours you might waste!
In this project, you need to visit your favourite online shopping portal first and collect all the required data like names of products, brand names, prices, discount offers, purchase links, etc. Next, track the extracted prices and discounts, so you will be notified whenever there's a price drop. Apart from online shopping stores, you can apply this project to determine price changes in other fields like cryptocurrency rates, stock prices, betting odds, etc.
Concluding Thoughts
Data collection and structuring information often become challenging for companies, resulting in the wastage of resources. With web scraping, however, organizations can use the data available publicly across websites and automate repetitive tasks and other projects within minutes. Just hire a professional web scraper skilled in coding and automating tasks using Python. That's it! You are just a few steps away from accomplishing your goals!