Does your business struggle to gain clarity from multiple sources of fragmented public data, which hinders your ability to make timely strategic decisions? In addition to providing a clear method for determining what to look for when choosing a web scraping provider, this article outlines a decision-making model for assessing potential providers. Using this model, you can find an appropriate provider for your needs and provide you with the confidence that they will deliver consistent, flexible and high-quality data streams which you can use directly in your operational functions.
Overview: What to Look for
- Data Integrity & Validity: Check that the supplier validates the data they collect so that what you get is accurate, structured and ready to use immediately.
- Legality & Ethics: Make sure said supplier is fully compliant with all applicable laws, including GDPR, CCPA, etc., outside of the legal terms of service for the website being scraped in order to limit your potential liability.
- Customisation & Data Exchange: Such suppliers should build custom web scraping solutions for one-off/unique requirements and also integrate with an existing CRM or Business Intelligence (BI) system.
- Ongoing Support: Determine the support provided by the data extractor to their customers on an Ongoing Basis. This includes providing support during the initial implementation phase, and after the initial implementation through ongoing maintenance, updates, and continued monitoring of the target website(s) for changes that may cause downtime or disrupt service.
Beyond the Basics: Defining Your Data Imperative
Web Scraping Providers should be viewed as a Strategic Partner (not simply a Vendor) due to the substantial amount of Unstructured Data on the Internet (e.g., competitor price listings, market opinions/feelings about your products/services, etc.). To successfully extract this external data from the internet, an organisation needs a sophisticated infrastructure for extraction that goes way beyond simple extraction tools.
Before you engage with a Web Scraping Provider, a business needs to articulate what its Data Collection Imperative is. Identify specific Business Outcomes that you anticipate the extracted data will produce. Will this extracted data provide you with Real-Time Competitive Monitoring, Lead Generation, or enhance your Proprietary Database(s)? Your answers will define the Technical Requirements.
Technical and Operational Assessment Pillars
1. Capability and Robustness
In today’s modern websites, many complexities can make it difficult for a simple, generic scraper to collect information, including, but not limited to, JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA and other anti-bot technologies.
- Web Content Handling: The ability of the vendor to handle a website’s complexity with regard to dynamically loaded content (i.e. Websites created using React or Angular), the ability to manage user sessions, cookies, etc., without getting banned; all of these are crucial to collecting reliable data from the internet.
- Network Infrastructure and Session Management: Web scraping relies heavily on having a global network of proxies, which can rotate IPs, avoid rate limits and provide high levels of connectivity to ensure successful connections. It is the responsibility of an experienced web scraping vendor to manage these complexities.
- Data Output and APIs: To utilise the collected data within your organisation’s existing systems, you need to receive the output in a format that is easily consumed (e.g. JSON, CSV, or direct DB feed). Having the ability to integrate through a stable API is also required in order to automate the ingestion of data into your organisation and allow you to use the data quickly.
2. Ensuring Data Quality and Integrity
Scraped raw data is usually unclean and rarely ready to use as business intelligence; it needs to be processed, cleaned, and validated to provide a product of value. The most significant difference between an experienced provider and someone new at web[1] [2] scraping is data quality.
- Preventing “Wrong Pricing” via Validation: A scraper that interprets a competitor’s $1,000 as $10.00 will start a bad automated repricing war. Our experts use schema validation to ensure that all fields are correctly matched to their actual value (i.e., a price will always be a number, a date will always be valid, and a SKU will always be correct) to protect your pricing from potential algorithmic error.
- Stopping “Bad BI” via Structuring: Raw web HTML is messy. Feeding duplicate records or missing fields into your BI tools will trick your analytics. Our cleaning process standardises formats and eliminates duplicates so your analysts can focus on finding insights – not fixing spreadsheets.
- Avoiding lost revenue via Continuous Monitoring: Target websites change constantly. If a site changes its layout but your scraper fails silently, then you’re flying blind as your rivals move ahead. We monitor target sites constantly for code changes and update extraction logic as needed so you do not lose your market intelligence.
3. Scalability, Maintenance, and Support
Your business will be required to process more data as it grows. Therefore, you need to find a scalable service which can continue to support your growing needs and provide an indefinite level of maintenance and support.
- Velocity and Volume: Determine if the data extractor can crawl thousands to millions of pages per week without degrading in velocity or quality.
- Maintenance Reliability: Much of a provider’s value is tied to their ability to continually maintain the scrapers they create and make the necessary adjustments as soon as a target website changes its structure. When searching for a web scraping provider, look for one that has included this continued maintenance as part of their Service Agreement.
- Service Level Agreement (SLA): An SLA that clearly defines the service provider’s commitment to uptime, data freshness guarantees and response time for resolving technical issues is the difference between a true professional and someone who is just trying to make money off of your business. The commitment made by the provider through an SLA will help guide the development of future business strategies using timely and relevant data.
4. Legal and Ethical Compliance
Legal and ethical standards for web scraping are rapidly changing, and therefore, it is imperative to be aware of them to avoid exposing your organisation to excessive risk.
- Adherence to ToS: A legitimate web scraping service will review the Terms of Service (ToS) of the targeted website(s) and offer guidelines as to what constitutes ethical web scraping within those ToS boundaries. Respect for the robots.txt protocol is assumed unless specifically agreed upon with the client for specific, permitted purposes under applicable law.
- Data Privacy Laws (GDPR/CCPA): When extracting publicly available personally identifiable data, strict adherence to all global privacy laws and regulations is required. The service provider must have a method of collecting and processing such data responsibly and in compliance with the law, including providing an auditable record of its actions to protect against potential claims by third parties.
- Auditing and Transparency: Selecting a service provider which provides you with transparency into their methodologies enables you to monitor the services provided and to provide legal evidence that your web scraping activities were conducted in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, reducing exposure to potential liabilities while applying due diligence to the data you receive.
DataSOS Technologies: Your Partner in Data Excellence
DataSOS Technologies understands that modern businesses rely on data as its “lifeblood.”DataSOS has a large team of IT professionals who are focused solely on creating a customised automated data collection and process automation experience for your business, removing tedious data collection tasks from your employees’ workload. We will take care of the anti-bot technologies, dynamic websites and ongoing site maintenance so you can concentrate on analysing the data and developing long-term business plans.
Call DataSOS Technologies today to discuss your data needs and see how our custom, robust data solutions can provide the actionable intelligence your business needs to stay ahead.