Getting Started With Web Scraping Automation
If there’s one thing web scrapers don’t enjoy, it’s manual work! While we’ve created many web scraping tutorials covering the basics, it’s web scraping automation that’ll help you scale up.
All web scraping methods can be tedious unless you make the effort to incorporate automation. When you automate web scraping, you get more done in less time and achieve far more of the benefits you need.
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Automating web scraping requires the use of tools and scripts that streamline the extraction of data from the desired sites. The core benefit of web scraping automation is that it eliminates the need for a person to handle these tasks.
When using tools like Scrapy, Puppeteer, and Selenium, you can efficiently and even easily accomplish more challenging tasks. That includes overcoming limitations often faced due to dynamic content extraction, data formatting, website structure changes, and pagination. This guide will provide you with the insights you need to make this possible.
What Is Automated Web Scraping?
Web scraping automation refers to the process of designing a web scraper that can automatically capture data and details from a website – data extraction if you’re feeling fancy 😉 – to use for the specific tasks you have, such as gathering information or monitoring product inventory. Data extraction from websites can be done on a large scale when you use automation to help you with the process.
In the simplest of forms, an auto scraper works to do the work that you would normally do with a copy-and-paste style. Automated web scraping happens when you run software programs to capture that data.
These tools, often referred to as web scrapers, will move through websites and capture the specific data you need, extract that data, and then place it into a useful form for you, such as by entering it into a spreadsheet or database.
It is critical to know that you should only use the process of automating web scraping in legitimate and ethical ways. The information we present to you on this page should never be used in a way that goes against ethical principles or does not abide by the terms and conditions of a website.
The Benefits of Automate Scraping
When you automate web scraping, you create several advantages for yourself. First, you’re setting up a program to handle the workload for you. Second, you get to take advantage of incredible data and insights that are available. You can then use that information to achieve a wide range of details that can help you make better decisions, increase competitiveness, improve your brand, or build revenue.
The following are some of the most important advantages of automating web scraping using the tools we will share in a moment:
Real-time market intelligence: Web scraping automation enables you to gather information in real-time. That means you can watch sales patterns or capture social media data virtually at the same time it is happening. This can help you truly understand your customers better and help you make better decisions. With up-to-date market intelligence collected from various websites, you can easily stay ahead of the competition.
Competitor analysis is efficient and streamlined: Most companies need to conduct competitor analysis on a routine basis to ensure they are producing or providing a product or service that is at least as good as the competition. Instead of sitting and watching what people say on social media or conducting a traditional market analysis that can take months to do, web scraping automation can capture the information you need in real-time. That could include, for example, pricing information, latest promotions, products, and even customer reviews.
Enhanced lead generation: With automated scraping, you can identify potential customers faster and turn them into paying customers sooner. This can help facilitate the work your sales team is doing. For example, you can build an auto scraper that will capture information, such as demographics or contact information, from a user through various online platforms, creating a way for you to ethically contact and market to those people long before they find your brand online.
Accurate financial data extraction: In a volatile economy, you need the most up-to-date information to remain ahead of the game. For accurate financial data extraction, including from financial reports, market databases, or company websites, you can always have the information you need to monitor financial details with efficiency. Because we are using an automatic web scraper, this process is human-proof. That means a person is not making mistakes in the movement of that data or entering errors that can set you back.
It’s super-efficient: Not only can web scraping automation do a great deal of work for you, but it is also very efficient. The math is obvious: with automated web scraping, you can gather more information without increasing the manhours you put into the process. You can scale the work you are doing with an auto scraper at the rate you desire, and as you do so, you minimize the risk of complications. Note that, when you use web scraping automation, you can collect data from multiple websites or resources within a matter of minutes and use that information for various applications. There is no more streamlined and efficient manner to get the information you need.
Customization: Another of the most important benefits you should consider about an automated web scraper is that it can do what you need. In a moment, we will list some of the most important use cases for an automated web scraper. Know that you can build your web scraper to capture a huge amount of information – or just a few specific details – without a lot of time. This type of customization of the formula or scraping algorithm will help you capture the information you need with efficiency.
Reasons to Automate Data Extraction from Website
Let’s demonstrate the various ways that you can use the data you scrape using an automated tool. Remember that this is customizable. That means that with the right tools and code, you can capture very specific or more broad information to fit your application needs and goals. Here are some of the most impressive and most commonly applied use cases for an automated web scraper:
- Lead generation: Get leads from multiple sources online
- Search engine optimization: Monitor SERPs to remain ahead of the game
- Sentiment analysis: Instead of just capturing information about what customers think, understanding what they are actually saying
- Real estate data: Use it as a way to capture real estate market data, sales and transaction information, pricing, specs, and much more
- Price intelligence: Learn how to price your product so that it remains competitive or stays ahead of the efforts your competitors are using to outprice you.
- Machine learning: You can use automated web scrapers to capture data to use for machine learning. That information can help train more complex AI bots to handle a wide range of in-depth contact extraction and uses for you.
- Research: Simply use it for research, including finding aggregate information from medical studies or research papers to use for your specific needs.
This is a basic list – you can do so much more if you would like to do so. There are many more ways web scraping will be used in the future. By adopting a strategy that works for you, you’ll be able to achieve most of what you need in minutes.
How Do You Automate Data Scraping?
Automated scraping requires the removal of the human from most of the tedious tasks required to complete data extraction. The goal is to set up a process that will allow for the automatic extraction of data from websites at the set time or when desired. There are several steps you need to take to automate scraping.
- Determine what the desired site is to scrape. This is where the data and information you need lives.
- Create a web scraper. You can learn more about building a web scraper to get started.
- Put proxies in place to protect your efforts while web scraping.
- Host the web scraper on a server.
- Set up a scheduler for the scraper.
- Have a way to store the data you scrape.
That is a lot of steps. There are other strategies to achieve the best web scraper automation possible. Let’s talk about a few of the best choices here.
How to Automate Web Scraping with Scrapy
Start by reading through our full web scraping with Scrapy tutorial to have a good understanding of how it works. Scrapy is a type of Python web crawling and scraping framework. It has numerous packages and libraries that allow you to handle the tasks you desire without the use of any code. Scrapy is often used for larger projects. It has the ability to scrape data from start to finish, including extracting the data, processing it, and then storing it in the format you desire.
You can use Scrapy to handle scraping most types of data online. It is best used for automating tasks that require a lot of data extraction. You should use Scrapy for web scraping automation in several key situations:
- You are scraping JavaScript websites with a significant amount of data.
- The website you are scraping is large.
- You are newer to web scraping, have a small project, and want to get into using Scrapy in the future.
To use Scrapy as a part of your web scraper automation, you will need to Get Scrapy downloaded. Then, follow our tutorial to learn more about how to create the code for your task.
How to Automate Web Scraping with Puppeteer
Another of the tools you can use to automate components of your web scraping process is Puppeteer. It is ideal for those who are scraping content from a dynamic website. You can follow our Puppeteer tutorial to learn the details about how to use this web scraping tool.
Puppeteer is a type of testing and automation library that does a great job of being a component of your web scraping tasks. It allows you to scrape dynamic content, which means that the content on the page can change based on the inputs provided by the user. You can use it to scrape web applications and load their content using JavaScript.
The Easiest Way To Get Started
Try our Web Scraping API for hassle-free results!
Why should you use Puppeteer as a part of your automated web scraping project? Puppeteer is an API built on a headless Chrome browser. API is a type of software that serves as a go-between for various software systems or web applications. There are a variety of benefits of establishing Puppeteer like this:
- Puppeteer will stretch your collection funnel in any direction you desire.
- Use it to interface with another API, often to display the extracted data directly in the UI of another application
- Use it as a plug-in to another software, like your database, to feed data directly where you want it to go
APIs like this are very easy to use, and they collect and transfer data seamlessly. Some of the use cases for Puppeteer for web scraping include:
- Extracting e-commerce data
- Update e-commerce data right on your website
- Scrape social media data
- Capture information about businesses
- Use it for SEO data collection
There are many benefits to using Puppeteer, including the simple fact that it acts like a human to navigate requests that involve taking some type of action.
How to Automate Web Scraping with Selenium
Another tool to use to automate data extraction from websites is Selenium. Selenium is a suite of tools designed specifically to help automate web browsers. It provides programming interfaces called bindings. You can use this, along with the programming language you prefer, like Python, to navigate the web and scrape the data you desire. Once you learn how to automate data extraction from website contents using Selenium, you will find it’s a bit more challenging than other tools. It can also do much more.
If you have not done so yet, read our full web scraping with Selenium tutorial. It breaks down the entire process of how to use this tool for any of the goals you need. What can Selenium do when used as an automated web scraper component? It’s great for tasks such as:
- Scrolling through web pages
- Taking screenshots of web pages
- Clicking buttons on a page to advance to the next page
- Filling out forms
- Executing custom JavaScript commands
Use Selenium to handle scraping data from dynamic sites, such as any website that is JavaScript-heavy. These are often called Single-Page Applications (SPAs). If you were using traditional web scraping tools, like HTTP requests or HTML parsing, you would be unable to navigate around the code on the page.
The job of Selenium is to automate browsers. That is what it does well, and that is all it does. You can choose from various Selenium options depending on what you wish to achieve, such as using Selenium WebDriver to create browser-based regression automation tests or Selenium IDE if you want to create a bug reproduction script.
The Importance of Structuring Your Automated Web Data Extraction Tool with Proxies
Once you learn how to web scrape in Python or use any of the other tools listed here, there is one important step to take before you complete the process: use proxies.
A proxy, like those offered by Rayobyte, is a tool that sits between you and the website you are targeting. As mentioned earlier, many websites do not want you to capture their data – after all, that could push you ahead of them when it comes to making better business decisions. To stop you from capturing the data, they will often use anti-bot technology. These are tools that can detect your IP address, which is the numerological figure that identifies where your server is located. If it sees that the same IP address is trying to navigate the website quickly and constantly, it’s going to flag that as a bot and block it. It’s that easy for them to do this.
A proxy is a core component of any automated web scraper. It allows you to work around those blocks and ensure you are getting the information you need without actually getting stuck due to bots. The bottom line is that automated web data extraction is not possible if you are detected and blocked.
Rayobyte offers a variety of tools to help you. Use our reliable proxies to help you streamline your automation process even more so. Read our guide on how to buy the best proxies for web scraping as a starting point. Then, dive into all of our website scraping proxy options, including rotating and data center proxies, to help you get the process started. You may find this is one of the best ways to make automation that much easier. An automated web scraper is a tool you need.
Contact us now for more information.
The Easiest Way To Get Started
Try our Web Scraping API for hassle-free results!
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