Could Data Extraction Software Boost your Business?

Web pages are built in HTML and XHTML, which contain a wealth of data that prove useful for businesses. With the enormous growth of websites, it is not possible to manually monitor and extract data from web pages.

Could Data Extraction Software Boost your Business?: eAskme
Could Data Extraction Software Boost your Business?: eAskme

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The market is flooded with software that automates data extraction activities for the business, thus saving time and other essential resources.

What is data extraction software?

Web scraping, also known as data extraction or web harvesting, is the process of gathering publicly available information from any website on the internet.

A web data extraction software is an Application Programming Software (API) that can retrieve data from a website in an automated manner.

In the process of data extraction, the web page is fetched, and the content is extracted.

This simply implies that the page is downloaded, and then the data is searched and rephrased, copied or reformatted.

Web crawling becomes a significant component of the web scraping process, as it allows identify the desired pages, and these pages are later used to extract the required data.

The purpose of web data extraction software is straightforward - extract the data from specific pages, so that businesses can use the information to gain actionable insights.

Currently, web scraping systems range from human-operated systems to automated applications that can extract entire websites data for later analysis.

Some websites are well-protected and use robust anti-scraping measures to prevent web-scraping of their content.

Hence, there are constant innovations to develop better web scraping software, as well as updating existing techniques of data extraction.

Uses of data extraction software

A data extraction software can be customized and built for a specific website or to work for generic data extraction from the World Wide Web.

The basic three-fold process of data extraction software can be outlined as follows:

⇒    Data extraction software identifies and extracts files, images, and other content from the web.
⇒    They organize these files using their API for exporting to certain files/destinations.
⇒    Data is prepared/analyzed and used for making business decisions that are ultimately geared towards revenue generation.

Data extraction is used for web mining, contact scraping, web indexing, tracking online presence, monitoring competitors’ activities,  research purposes, to name a few.

Should a business invest in data extraction practice?

Here are a few examples where businesses can use data extraction.

1. Scan competition

If a business is looking for leads and growth opportunities or wants to understand the competitor’s landscape, web scraping can be very useful.

You can land on the competitor’s website and scrape location-based identities and use them later for lead generation purposes.

What’s more, you can also harvest the data from multiple websites that cater to the same niche as your business.

Harnessing this information to understand your competitor’s stronghold in certain locations and what you can do to expand your business in that area will unlock further opportunities.

This location-specific data can help various segments, such as retail, healthcare, hospitality, and much more.

2. Price monitoring

Businesses can extract data from competitors to compare pricing in specific locations and decide the pricing of their products, which ultimately could help them win custom.

3. Customer feedback

Customers give feedback about the product quality and pricing on different comparisons sites.

A company can use web scraping software to collect all the feedback to acquire actionable insights for pricing strategy adjustments or product development.

4. Monitoring and tracking the online presence

Companies make tremendous investments in marketing their products online.

Data extraction software can help them monitor whether the publishers and digital agencies are marketing their products efficiently and understand the real ROI of their marketing efforts.

Introducing proxies

Proxy or a proxy server helps you in maintaining anonymity while accessing other websites.

When using a proxy server, you can access pretty much any site that you want to collect data from, without having to reveal your IP address.

If you extract data from certain websites regularly, the web server might eventually block the IP address, and restrict you from collecting data from the said website.

Thus, proxy servers are used by companies to stay anonymous while extracting the desired data.

It’s worth mentioning rotating proxies, that are also widely popular as they keep changing your IP address frequently by assigning a new IP from a pool of IP addresses.

This further decreases the chances of getting a block while scraping a given website.

For best results, it is strongly advised to use premium proxy servers  for hassle-free and successful data extraction operation.

The bottom line

Using a data extraction software helps in automating time-consuming processes that could take hours to complete manually.

But remember to use proven services of a competent data extraction software instead of opting for standard web data collections tools.

The golden rule to always keep in mind is you get what you pay for.

Hence, don't think twice about cheap options. Go for a premium data extraction provider for guaranteed results.

Check out the oxylabs.io blog post on their solution that is one of the most robust and advanced data extraction software out there presently.

One thing for sure, the data extraction software is a boon for businesses who want to create opportunities on demand for themselves and outrun their competition.
If you still have any question, do share via comments.



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