Businesses depend on data to make the best decisions, win more market shares, attract new customers, and protect their online reputation. This makes data collection one of the most important activities for any modern business.
And with more companies looking to exploit the avenue to grow and expand, it is crucial to highlight all of the data extraction benefits, understand its challenges and the many ways to handle these challenges.
In the next few segments, we will describe how a brand can benefit from web scraping, the possible challenges it might face and the most effective way to deal with it.
What Are The Benefits of Data Extraction?
Data extraction, also commonly known as web scraping, can best be understood as gathering data across the internet.
It is a process that uses different tools to find data, inspect the data, and then interact with the data source to collect the raw HTML file. Then this is parsed and converted to some structured format before it is returned and stored for immediate or future use.
Data extraction has numerous benefits, including the following:
- Brand Monitoring and Protection
With anyone in the world reaching data from any part of the internet, it has become quite common for companies to face all kinds of online threats.
First, there is the issue of asset theft, where intellectual properties such as brand name, logo, and concepts can be stolen by people and used to manufacture counterfeit products and services.
Secondly, the internet has also made it easy for buyers to express their feedback and reviews more openly and freely. Some of the reviews may be negative, and when seen by potential buyers, they may influence their buying decision and dissuade them from patronizing the brand.
To avoid both incidents, enterprises now need to regularly collect large data from different platforms and servers.
- Understanding the Market and Buyers
Some of the things that successful businesses keep tabs on are market trends, consumer sentiments, and buyers’ behavior.
By fully understanding the above, a brand can easily tailor its business to make the least mistakes and the most gains.
This can be easily learned and understood following frequent data extraction operations.
- Ad Verification
Businesses also need to monitor and verify ad campaigns, especially if they run campaigns regularly.
This is to prevent the ads from getting hijacked and ensure they are running correctly on the right platforms and in the right formats.
Checking how an ad is running and keeping it away from criminals requires collecting large doses of data every day.
- Lead Generation
Another important data extraction application is gathering potential buyers, also known as leads.
Leads can be generated from different platforms and websites by collecting data, including their names and contact information.
What Are Some Challenges of Collecting Digital Data
But collecting digital data is neither easy nor straightforward and loaded with common challenges such as:
- The Need for Automation
Data extraction requires collecting millions of datasets from millions of web pages. In most cases, different websites need to be opened simultaneously to ensure all the data is collected in real-time.
The sheer size and need to run multiple websites simultaneously can be quite daunting and make data extraction less exciting.
- Changing Website Structures
Data extraction occurs on several websites simultaneously, but there is no guarantee that the website structures will remain the same on two different scrapings.
Websites often have to upgrade and update their structures to appear more modern and provide the best user experience.
However, this can affect the extraction process negatively as it often means that the tools that work with the old structure may crash when they meet the new structure.
- High Cost
Collecting data is not cheap, and everything from getting the tools to spending time running and managing the process can cost a lot of resources.
Acquiring tools such as web scrapers, private proxies, data parsers, and storage units can be quite expensive.
Sometimes, it can cost so much that smaller businesses can find it almost impossible to afford.
How a Web Scraper API Can Help Mitigate These Challenges
Many of the challenges, especially those explained above, are often due to the lack of proper information.
For instance, using certain tools such as a web scraper API, the challenges above can easily be undone.
A scraper API can be directly connected to a data source to facilitate automation and ensure that the data is harvested quickly and without hassle.
Scraper APIs also eliminate the need for multiple tools such as proxies and parsers, as they are developed to work with systems without passing routes. This makes it less expensive and more affordable to perform data extraction.
And finally, scarper APIs are often updated regularly to keep up with website changes. This makes it almost impossible to crash as they adapt easily to structural changes.
Oxylabs offers a high-quality and easy-to-use Web Scraper API, definitely check it out.
Conclusion
Data extraction or web scraping allows a brand unlimited access to any amount and type of data it wants.
It requires automation, extra cost and regular updating, which should be a challenge, especially for smaller businesses.
However, these challenges can be fixed using tools like a web scraper API.