What Is Data Scraping? How It Works and Why Use It

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Data scraping or web scraping is the process of automatically retrieving and exporting information from the web into a spreadsheet or a local file saved on your computer.

If you’re investing in Internet marketing, you already know how valuable managing your data is. From customer information to site metrics, data is essential for getting the most insight into your approach. However, there is more than one way to collect data — like data scraping.

But what is data scraping? And why does it matter for businesses?

This guide takes you through everything you need about data scraping. Here’s what we will cover:

What is data scraping?
How does data scraping work?
5 data scraping tools
Applications of data scraping
Data scraping pros and cons
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What is data scraping?
Data scraping or web scraping is the process of automatically retrieving and exporting information from the web into a spreadsheet or a local file saved on your computer.

How does data scraping work?
Data scraping can be done manually or automatically with tools. The process is the same for both — either you or a tool will go through the pages of a website’s code and find data that you require.

To scrape data manually, you can:

Identify the target website
Collect URLs of the target pages
Request the URLs to get the HTML of the page
Use locators to find the information you need in the HTML
Save the data in your preferred format
You can save more time and money by adopting automated tools.

Automated data scraping tools come in various shapes, sizes, and forms that vary in operation and functionality. They follow a similar process that involves requesting data from the page or website you want, identifying the specific data field you require, and exporting the data to a report you previously created.

5 data scraping tools
The most common web scrapers are browser extensions or computer software installed on your device. Web scraper extensions are preferred because they’re simpler to run and easy to use once you add them to your browsers.

Here are top examples of data scraper extensions:

Data Scraper: This Google Chrome extension extracts data from any web pages open on your browser. You don’t need to specify any parameters. Data Scraper extracts the data from the HTML webpages and imports it into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Data Miner: Data Miner is another Chrome extension that allows you to scrape data from web pages and upload them to Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
Scrape.do: This tool allows you to extract data from multiple websites, including hard-to-scrape websites like Google, at no extra costs. Scrape.do is scalable and fast, allowing you to import data from anonymous sites like Instagram in under five seconds.
If you want a data scraping tool that’s not limited by a browser, consider getting downloadable applications, like:

Octroparse: A no-code data scraping tool with a user-friendly interface that allows you to scrape data from various websites, including ecommerce, social media, and marketing platforms. It’s downloadable for Windows and MacOS devices and offers cloud storage services and IP rotation.
ParseHub: A desktop application downloadable on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X devices with a separate browser extension tool. You can use it to extract data from websites using cookies, JavaScript, or AJAX technologies.
Applications of data scraping
Data scraping helps you simplify tons of online data into a more manageable, easy-to-understand, and simple-to-manipulate format. The data you import through this process can help you achieve multiple business goals.

You can generally use web scraping for:

Gaining insights about market trends and consumer behavior
Exploring online product catalogs to find ways to improve your own
Analyzing customer behavior and opinions
Gathering new lead information
Performing a competitive analysis
Building product comparison tools
Informing website transitions
Collecting information about potential customers of clients
Conducting in-depth research to inform business development decisions
Your business can leverage data scraping to analyze and process vast data from other websites. For instance, you may want to scrape from competitor websites to gain insight into consumer behavior or from review sites to help you improve your offerings.

Scraping tools bypass measures implemented by companies to limit access to content they wouldn’t want to be reused for unauthorized access. However, ethically, data scraping should only provide you with access to data that are already publicly available on the Internet.

Pros and cons of data scraping
Is data scraping right for your business? That may be easier to determine with some pros and cons.

Here are the top pros of automated data scraping:

Uses business resources efficiently: Automated data scraping makes data collocation and processing fast and efficient, saving your business time and ensuring you can fully utilize big data.
Grants access to real-time data updates: When you have data scraping tools or extensions installed on devices, they’ll gather and present you with real-time updates that may influence decision-making.
Offers a competitive edge: Data scraping allows you to analyze competitor websites for insights into pricing structures and product offerings. They also let you observe market trends from news sites and use this data to make future decisions and position yourself competitively.
Saves time and money: Using web scraping tools saves your business lots of money and time that would be spent manually analyzing data. These resources can then be channeled to other money-making ventures.
Produces high-quality data sets: Automated web scraper tools have a negligible margin of error, presenting you with clean, well-structured, and up-to-date data you can easily interpret.
While data scraping has many benefits, it can be a menace for some when abused. Here are some cons to data scraping:

Information misuse: One of the top ways data scraping is abused is when it’s used to extract people’s email addresses from social media sites or cookie-enabled websites. These emails are then sold to spammers, who use them to send unwanted marketing messages to innocent people. Sometimes, the emails are sold to scammers, who use them to send phishing emails and spread malware.
Violating terms of service: Another unethical use of web scraping is using it to violate a website’s privacy policies, terms of service, and copyrights.
Scraping speed issue: If you try to do more than your technology allows when scraping, it can backfire. Failing to monitor how fast you scrape data can lead to IP bans, server overload, and loss of access to valuable data.