Web scraping is a very useful data collection method. It automates the way businesses collect data on a large scale. Data is growing increasingly important for businesses. As competition grows, businesses need to ensure they’re ahead of the pack every step of the way. The best way to do this is by researching market trends and making data-driven decisions.
In this article, we’ll look at how to scale your data scraping efforts to collect more information faster. We’ll also be looking at the specific tools required and why you should buy residential proxies for this process. Scrapers such as the ones provided by Smartproxy often empower the data scraping process.
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is an automated data collection process. These tools are used to collect specific data from multiple websites quickly. Once the data has been collected, the tool compiles it into a single readable format, such as a spreadsheet. Once the information has been compiled, you can use it in various ways. You can analyze it for any emerging trends, evaluate it to see where you can improve, and much more.
Data scraping is a very useful process that can be used for various functions within a business. It can be used to conduct market research, monitor competitors, improve SEO, remain competitive, and monitor customer sentiment among others.
You can use web scraping tools to collect product prices from your competitors to ensure your pricing is competitive. You can use it to see where your content ranks in search results and evaluate competitors ranking higher to see how you can improve your content. You can use it to track any mentions of your business, giving you the chance to find influencers or deal with negative experiences.
Why Scale Your Web Scraping Efforts?
Businesses rely on data for various reasons. Some smaller businesses only need a little bit to ensure they’re on the right track. In this case, they might only need to do data scraping every once in a while.
However, larger corporations or aggregate businesses rely on a lot more information. They might need to scrape thousands of websites every day. As such, they need tools that can handle this amount of work. They will also need a way to scale their scraping efforts while also overcoming many challenges that come along with it.
Challenges such as CAPTCHAs and other anti-bot measures will provide obstacles that your scraper will have to overcome in order to collect data. IP bans can make it impossible for your scraper to access certain sites, which makes your data collection efforts incomplete or inaccurate. These can make scaling your web scraping efforts difficult. Luckily, these challenges can be overcome fairly easily if you know what tools to use.
When to Scale Your Web Scraping?
Knowing when to scale your data scraping efforts will come down to the amount of data you need. For example, an aggregator website that relies on constant data in real-time will need to scale its scraping efforts much sooner than a small business.
Once you start to notice that it’s taking too long to collect data, or that you’re receiving too many IP bans, it might be time to start thinking about scaling your efforts. If you know that your business will depend on large volumes of data daily, you might want to scale your efforts immediately.
How to Scale Your Web Scraping?
One of the best ways to effectively scale your web scraping efforts is to start using a proxy alongside your scraper. When you buy residential proxies, the IP assigned to them will be linked to real devices. As such, any websites you scrape will see them as real users. This means you can avoid IP bans and scrape more websites faster. Because your tool now looks like a real user, they’ll be able to bypass many of the anti-bot restrictions.
When you’re scaling your web scraping efforts, managing the IPs being used can become a full-time job. You might need to manually assign different IPs to each request, and once they get blocked, you need to use new ones. This is not the best way to spend your time.
As such, you want to buy residential proxies from a reliable provider that offers a large proxy pool with IPs and also has unlimited concurrent threads to make scaling easier. You can even look at rotating proxies, which are a type of residential proxy that automatically assigns a new IP with each request. This will make your IP management much easier.
Final Thoughts
Web scraping is a beneficial process for collecting data. However, once you start needing more information, challenges can start coming up. You’ll need to scale your scraping efforts to stay on top of the demand while using residential proxies to overcome some of the challenges.
