Web scraping: what is it? What is it used for?

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Do you want to automate your prospecting or marketing actions? Generate more leads? Enrich the quality of your CRM data? In short, do you want to grow your business using effective levers?

Our growth marketing agency has an effective solution: web scraping.

We know, you're going to ask us: "but what is web scraping? what is it for?" Don't panic: this article gives you all the answers.

Summary :
Web scraping: definition
How does web scraping work?
How to do web scraping?
Web scraping: is it legal?
Why use web scraping?
Web scraping and lead generation
Web scraping and CRM enrichment
Web scraping and competitive intelligence
Web scraping and branding
3 essential things to know before you start
Web scraping: definition
Literally, " web scraping " means "to scrape the web". More concretely, this information technique consists of automatically extracting data from a website .

This automation process therefore allows you to collect information in large quantities italy telegram data particularly for marketing or commercial purposes. Web scraping can, in fact, be used to collect names, email addresses or telephone numbers that you can use in your digital prospecting . This is called " prospecting automation ".

That said, web scraping can also be manual. You do it necessarily, but without giving the name. It is simply a matter of copying and pasting data in order to build a database. The disadvantage is that it quickly becomes time-consuming when you are trying to collect a lot of information (and avoid human error!). If this is your case, opt for automatic web scraping.

How does web scraping work?
Web scraping works using computer programs called bots. Their role: to crawl a web page to extract large amounts of data and store it in a database or file (which you can then export).

This process usually goes like this:

You indicate the URL of the site or web page that you want to “scrape”;

You specify the type of data you want to extract;

The bots do their collection work.

How to do web scraping?
There are several methods for doing web scraping.

You could already develop your own web scraper … If you have web development skills or if you know an agency that is an expert in web scraping (…like Axiom Marketing!).

Online web scraping solutions also make marketing automation or prospecting automation easier . They are accessible to people who have no programming knowledge, and directly from your web browser. Our experts will be able to recommend some and help you make the most of them! Contact us.

web scraping
Web scraping: is it legal?
Although very useful for marketing or digital prospecting, web scraping is sometimes controversial . Indeed, the practice is not illegal… but, it is not always legal for all that.

In reality, the question of legality does not arise on the practice of web scraping itself, but on the use you will make of the extracted data. Let's take a simple example: you copy and paste data from a blog article for personal purposes, so you are doing web scraping. However, this does not pose a problem, neither for the author of the article, nor for the natural or legal person who owns the site. On the other hand, if you appropriate this content as your own, to use it on your own website, this is not ethical and you are also infringing copyright.

In general, web scraping practices must respect the conditions of use of the scanned sites, especially in terms of intellectual property and protection of personal data .