In today‘s digital landscape, data reigns supreme. The internet offers an infinite supply of valuable information that can give businesses a competitive edge. However, collecting all that data manually would be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. That‘s where web scraping comes in.
Web scraping, also called web data extraction or web harvesting, is the process of using bots to automatically collect information from websites. It allows you to gather large amounts of structured data in a fraction of the time it would take to do it by hand.
As the volume of data on the internet continues to explode, web scraping has become an essential tool for businesses looking to harness big data for marketing purposes. According to a study by Deloitte, the percentage of companies using web scraping increased from 17% in 2018 to 30% in 2020. And the global web scraping services market is projected to reach $2.9 billion by 2027, up from $1.3 billion in 2020.
So how exactly are marketers leveraging web scraping to gain an advantage? Here are three of the most common and impactful applications:
1. Generating Leads at Scale
A steady stream of high-quality leads is the lifeblood of any successful marketing operation. But finding and compiling accurate contact information for your target prospects is incredibly labor-intensive if done manually. Web scraping automates the process so you can build massive lists of leads in a snap.
For example, say you‘re promoting a new SaaS product for real estate agents. You could scrape popular real estate websites and directories to quickly assemble a database of realtors, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, locations, brokerages, listings and more. You could then break down that data by different criteria, like deal volume or luxury listings, to segment your outreach.
Case in point: Residential real estate firm FastHomeSolutions used web scraping to generate leads 10x faster. By scraping public tax records and real estate sites, they collected detailed data on homeowners, like purchase history, age, liens and estimated home equity. This helped them identify the most promising prospects to pursue.
"Web scraping has totally transformed our lead generation," said FastHomeSolutions CMO Dan Smith. "We‘re able to cast a much wider net and find homeowners who are statistically more likely to be interested in selling. Our sales team is thrilled with the higher quality of leads they‘re getting now."
Here are some of the most useful types of sites for scraping leads in any industry:
- Business directories (e.g. YellowPages, Yelp, Google My Business)
- Social networks (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
- Industry databases (e.g. Crunchbase, Owler, AngelList)
- Trade show and conference attendee lists
- Webinar and newsletter sign-up forms
2. Conducting Deeper Market Research
In the fast-moving world of business, it‘s essential to stay on top of market trends and ahead of the competition. Web scraping empowers you to keep a pulse on your industry and inform smarter strategic decisions.
You can scrape industry news sites, research reports, press releases, regulatory filings and more to monitor market conditions and trajectory. This can provide earlier detection of disruptive startups, technologies, customer behavior shifts and other factors that could impact your business.
Review sites and online forums offer a trove of customer feedback and insight as well. Scraping user-generated content about your company, products, competitors and industry yields candid intel about customer needs, concerns and preferences. This "voice of the customer" data can help guide product development, positioning and customer experience improvements.
Web scraping is also a powerful tool for keeping tabs on your competitors. Extracting data from their websites and marketing channels reveals how they operate, who they target, what they charge, how customers perceive them and more. You can even estimate a competitor‘s web traffic by scraping data from sites like Similarweb and Alexa.
Home goods retailer Wayfair used web scraping to conduct a massive competitive analysis. They scraped more than 5 million product pages across Amazon, Walmart, Target and other rivals to benchmark pricing on identical items. The insights helped Wayfair better compete on price while preserving margins.
Some key data points to target when scraping competitors:
- Product specs, pricing and promotions
- Customer reviews and sentiment
- Website content and SEO/PPC keywords
- Social media activity and follower engagement
- Employee details and job postings
- Blog content and PR/news mentions
3. Optimizing Search Engine Performance
Organic search traffic is the holy grail for most marketers. Ranking at the top of Google and other search engines attracts valuable prospects actively looking for what you offer. Web scraping gives you the SEO intelligence you need to outrank the competition.
Start by scraping search engine results pages (SERPs) for your priority keywords. Analyze metrics like domain authority (DA), page authority (PA), backlinks, content length, keyword usage, meta tags and page speed of the top-ranking pages. This helps you determine the most important signals to optimize for so you can update your content accordingly.
Let‘s say you run marketing for a pet food brand. If you find that top results for "organic dog food" have the keyword in their title tag, URL and H1, plus 1,000+ words of content and DA of 60+, you know you‘ll need to hit those benchmarks to compete for page one rankings.
Web scraping also comes in handy for tracking your search rankings over time and measuring the impact of SEO changes. With automated scraping on a set schedule, you can easily keep tabs on your page positions and organic traffic trends.
Finally, don‘t forget to spy on competitors‘ SEO efforts too. Crawling their sites can uncover keyword gaps, backlink opportunities, content ideas and other ways to beat them in search.
Home security company Frontpoint used web scraping to overhaul their SEO approach. Scraping and analyzing more than 100,000 SERPs revealed valuable insights like:
- Ideal content length and keyword density
- The importance of backlinks and referring domains
- Most impactful technical factors like site speed and schema markup
By putting those findings into action, Frontpoint boosted their share of page one rankings by 79% and organic traffic by 63% year-over-year.
Choosing the Right Web Scraping Tool
With the proliferation of web scraping for marketing and other data-driven use cases, many software tools have emerged to simplify the process. Features and capabilities vary, so it‘s important to select a web scraping tool that aligns with your objectives, budget and technical know-how.
Here‘s a comparison of some of the leading web scraping solutions on the market:
| Tool | Features | Pricing | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | – Massive proxy network – No-code and API options – 24/7 customer support | $500+/month | Enterprises with high-volume scraping needs |
| Octoparse | – Point-and-click interface – Scheduled and real-time scraping – Cloud service for large jobs | $75+/month | Scraping beginners and non-technical users |
| Proxycrawl | – Ready-made crawlers and scrapers – Global proxy network – Scraping API for devs | $29+/month | Quick and simple scraping projects |
| Scrapy | – Open source and free – Built-in data processing – Highly customizable and scalable | Free | Developers building bespoke scraping solutions |
| Mozenda | – Plug-and-play agent builder – Scheduled recurring extractions – Quality control and error handling | $250+/month | Scraping structured data on a set schedule |
Web Scraping Best Practices
To get the most out of web scraping while mitigating risk, follow these guidelines:
- Respect website terms of service and robots.txt instructions
- Limit your request rate to avoid overloading servers
- Use proxy servers or IP rotation to prevent blocks and bans
- Comply with data regulations like GDPR and CCPA
- Only collect information for legitimate business purposes
- Consult with legal counsel if you‘re unsure about usage rights
The Future of Web Scraping in Marketing
As the marketing world becomes ever more data-driven, web scraping will only grow in importance and sophistication. Gartner predicts that by 2022, 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention data as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency.
Forward-thinking marketers are already leveraging web scraping to achieve key objectives faster and more efficiently than their competitors. From laser-targeted lead generation to deep market research to SEO fine-tuning, the use cases are virtually unlimited.
Advancements in AI and machine learning will make web scraping even more powerful in the years ahead. As scrapers become smarter about extracting and processing both structured and unstructured data, even non-technical marketers will be able to leverage web data to drive better decision making.
So if you haven‘t started harnessing web scraping for marketing, now is the time to get on board. With the right strategy, tools and approach, it will be your secret weapon for outsmarting the competition and achieving breakout growth.