Real Data Scraping Issues: How Are They Fixed?

Businesses extract data to understand market trends, customer buying behaviors, and competitors’ marketing strategies. Having a data scraping method solves one of your biggest problems, i.e., generating qualified leads. Every business needs a data scraping tool that gathers data from multiple sites and compiles it in one place. However, each method comes with its share of pros and cons. Below, we have compiled a list of tips to help you discover the most effective ways to conduct data scraping. Let’s get started.

What is Real Data Scraping?

Data or web scraping is the process of extracting information from the internet. This data is automatically imported to your spreadsheet or the file stored on your PC. The main purpose of web scraping is to find leads, grow sales, and boost revenues. This data can also help a startup learn more about the competitor’s marketing tactics, strengths and weaknesses, pricing policy, and other metrics that will give them a competitive edge.

How to use Dynamic Web Queries in MS Excel to Scrape Data?

Dynamic web queries are the most versatile and an efficient way to import data from multiple websites into a spreadsheet. Let's look at the easy steps for using this method to scrape data.

Open a new file in the Excel sheet.
Select the cell where you’d like the data to be imported
Select “Data,” “Get External Data,” “From Web”
In Google’s address bar, paste the website URL with the data you need to import.
Right next to the data, you will see a yellow button. Click on that. The Import Data dialogue box will pop up on your screen.
Click “Ok”

There you go! The data will be copied and pasted to your selected cell in the Excel file.

How to Scrape Data with Automated Tools?

The above technique can help you collect data, but if you need data scraping regularly, you might find the automatic data scraping tools more effective. We have researched a few tools that come in handy for data importing.

Data Scraper: It’s a plugin that’s added to your browser and is known for providing recipes to scrape data from popular sites like Wikipedia and Twitter. Its free version is available on Chrome. Don’t forget to go over the intro to get a clear idea of how the tool works.

WebHarvy: This one is the most flexible tool for data mining. Its built-in browser allows you to navigate the website quickly and set up your own mining instructions.

Import.io: If you want leads, competitor analysis, or in-depth research, you should check out import.io. This data mining tool keeps you updated with the changes to the target website, imports everything in a single click and is easy to use.

How can Marketers Effectively Use Data Scraping to their Advantage?

Data scraping is primarily used for marketing. Gone are the days when business leaders would make decisions based on guesswork. Today, they import data, analyze that, and understand the market trends before launching a new product. Qualitative research is especially helpful in identifying your target audience's buying patterns and competitors’ marketing strategies.

A data-centric marketing strategy is one where you make all business decisions based on the data you’ve collected. It’s mostly about your customers. Here’s why a majority of businesses are using data scraping techniques.

To research their target audience's buying behavior
To determine the flexibility of a sales funnel
To invest the business budget in the right advertising platforms.
To engage the target audience
To retain the existing customers
To stay up-to-date with the current market trends
To make informed decisions when it comes to investments
To select the most viable and profitable marketing channels

Taking unstructured data, compiling it, and storing it in one place is what every marketer wants. The goal is to turn these unorganized pieces of data extracted from multiple sources into structured data.

Data scraping helps a lot in research and data compiling. The data scraping tools are helpful when you find a website with the information you need, however, it is not organized or is listed in a way that is hard to understand.

What are the Challenges Faced by Companies in Data Scraping?

Web scraping has become a popular technique among marketers, but as it scales, it presents new challenges. Before trying web scraping, you should watch out for the following things.

Bot access: Some websites implement a restriction on data scraping. If robots.txt reveals you that you can't scrape data from a website, you should ask the website owner nicely why you can't do so. You can also request if they can make an exception for you. If they disagree, look for an alternative site.
Web Page Structures: Each web page has a different structure and requires a different web scraper. Things get challenging when the web page is updated with new information, which further changes its format, making scraping difficult.
Captcha: Data scraping is not tricky when doing it manually, but if it’s an automated process, you might face some challenges. Most websites have implemented a Captcha to distinguish humans from bots. Although Captchas are no longer a barrier for bots, they can still delay the process.
Honeypot Traps: Sometimes, website owners might place a trap to catch the bots that might scrape the data. It’s not for humans, but scrapers can see this trap. Once it falls into it, the website owner will collect their IP address and block them.

How can Blocking be Avoided?

Be careful about the links you use before scraping. Links from trusted websites are less likely to collect your IP address and block your access. Even though there's no way to know for sure, it's less likely that a trusted website has set up honeypot traps.

Not solving the captcha is another reason why you might get blocked. Hiring captcha solvers that will solve these questions and submit the answers to you is a great way to bypass this security However, if that seems too expensive, you can use AI-powered bots and machine learning to fetch answers automatically.

List of the Best Ways to Scrape the Web

Respect the robots.txt file before scraping the web. These files have information about which pages you can scrape and which you can’t. Leave the sites that have banned bots of all kinds.
Be very careful about the number of requests sent to the servers, as too many requests at once will crash the server, resulting in a bad user experience. Maintain some gap between the requests sent to avoid getting blocked.
Try to visit a website during non-peak hours. This will provide you with a seamless browsing experience.
Avoid websites with honeypot traps. You might get banned forever if you get trapped in it.

Concluding thoughts

Given its uses in retail, banking, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and almost every industry, it’s safe to say that data scraping has become a new standard. Businesses base their marketing campaigns on this data to reap the best results. Hope this guide helped you learn everything about data scraping, the safe ways to practice it, and the common challenges you might face when scraping data from different websites. Follow the above tips for a safe and smooth scraping experience.

Real Data Scraping Issues: How They Are Fixed?