Pulling Data from the Web: How to Get Data from a Website
The value of web data is increasing in every industry from retail competitive price monitoring to alternative data for investment research. Getting that data from a website is vital to the success of your business. As the trusted research firm, Gartner, stated in their blog:
“Your company’s biggest database isn’t your transaction, CRM, ERP or other internal database. Rather it’s the Web itself…Treat the Internet itself as your organization’s largest data source. ”
In fact, the internet is the largest source of business data on earth and it’s growing by the minute. The infograph below from Domo shows how much web data is created every minute from just a few websites out of a billion.
Source Domo
It’s clear the need for web data integration is greater than ever. This article will walk you through a simple process of pulling data from a webpage using data extraction software. First, let’s look at other uses of web data in business.
How do businesses use data from a website?
Competitive price comparison and alternative data for equity research are two popular uses of website data, but there are others less obvious.
Here are a few examples:
Teaching Movie Studios how to spot a hit manuscript
For StoryFit, data is the fuel that powers its predictive analytic engines. StoryFit’s artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are trained using vast amounts of data culled from a variety of sources, including extractors. This data contributes to StoryFit’s core NLP-focused AI to train machine learning models to determine what makes a hit movie.
Predicative Shipping Logistics
ClearMetal is a Predictive Logistics company using data science to unlock unprecedented efficiencies for global trade. They are using web data to mine all container and shipping information in the world then feed predictions back to companies that run terminals.
Market Intelligence
XiKO provides market intelligence around what consumers say online about brands and products. This information allows marketers to increase the efficacy of their programs and advertising. The key to XiKO’s success lies in its ability to apply linguistic modeling to vast amounts of data collected from websites.
Data-driven Marketing
Virtuance uses web data to review listing information from real estate sites to determine which listings need professional marketing and photography. From this data, Virtuance determines who needs their marketing services and develops success metrics based on the aggregated data.
Now that you have some examples of what companies are doing with web data, below are the steps that will show you how to pull data from a website.
Steps to get data from a website
Websites are built for human consumption, not machine. So it’s not always easy to get web data into a spreadsheet for analysis or machine learning. Copying and pasting information from websites is time-consuming, error-prone and not feasible.
Web scraping is a way to get data from a website by sending a query to the requested page, then combing through the HTML for specific items and organizing the data. If you don’t have an engineer on hand, provides a no-coding, point and click web data extraction platform that makes it easy to get web data.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how it works:
Step 1. First, find the page where your data is located. For instance, a product page on
Step 1. First, find the page where your data is located.
Step 2. Copy and paste the URL from that page into, to create an extractor that will attempt to get the right data.
Step 2. Copy and paste the URL from that page into
Step 3. Click Go and will query the page and use machine learning to try to determine what data you want.
Step 4. Once it’s done, you can decide if the extracted data is what you need. In this case, we want to extract the images as well as the product names and prices into columns. We trained the extractor by clicking on the top three items in each column, which then outlines all items belonging to that column in green.
Step 4. Once it’s done, you can decide if the extracted data is what you need.
Step 5. then populates the rest of the column for the product names and prices.
Step 6. Next, click on Extract data from website.
Step 7. has detected that the product listing data spans more than one page, so you can add as many pages as needed to ensure that you get every product in this category into your spreadsheet.
Step 8. Now, you can download the images, product names, and prices.
Step 9. First, download the product name and price into an Excel spreadsheet.
Step 10. Next, download the images as files to use to populate your own website or marketplace.
What else can you do with web scraping?
This is a very simple look at getting a basic list page of data into a spreadsheet and the images into a Zip folder of image files.
There’s much more you can do, such as:
Link this listing page to data contained on the detail pages for each product.
Schedule a change report to run daily to track when prices change or items are removed or added to the category.
Compare product prices on Amazon to other online retailers, such as Walmart, Target, etc.
Visualize the data in charts and graphs using Insights.
Feed this data into your internal processes or analysis tools via the APIs.
Web scraping is a powerful, automated way to get data from a website. If your data needs are massive or your websites trickier, offers data as a service and we will get your web data for you.
No matter what or how much web data you need, can help. We offer the world’s only web data integration platform which not only extracts data from a website, it identifies, prepares, integrates, and consumes it. This platform can meet an organization’s consumption needs for business applications, analytics, and other processes. You can start by talking to a data expert to determine the best solution for your data needs, or you can give the platform a try yourself. Sign up for a free seven day trial, or we’ll handle all the work for you.
How to Collect Consumer Data on a Web Business
Collecting data from your small business’s website allows you to track which demographics are making specific purchases and increase your ability to cross-sell new products to existing customers. Privacy concerns are ever present, but web-based businesses are taking new approaches to data collection. According to the New York Times, “as big sites like Facebook draw criticism that they collect consumers’ information in a stealthy manner, many Web start-ups are pursuing a more reciprocal approach–saying, in essence: give us your data and get something in return. ” Review your website traffic reports. Your small business’s website hosting provider compiles website logs that detail traffic, number of hits, average time on page and other data useful for determining the browsing habits of your customers. Using your hosting provider’s weblog data, single out the data most important to you so as to focus on the best information. According to BNET, “Web site logs can deliver a mind-numbing array of data that quickly becomes tedious to wade through. It’s important to isolate the key measures that really show how the Web site is performing. ” Ask your website designer to add a data form to your business website. It should be brief, asking only pertinent questions, and easy to complete. BNET’s advice about forms is to keep them short and to the point. Long forms will discourage people from completing them. If you feel you can’t shorten the form, divide it up into small sections. Once the form has been added, visit your website from a computer other than your own so as to avoid cookies and memory cache, and see how it looks on a different PC. Fill the form out and submit it to test whether it is working properly. Retrieve data from your merchant processor. When your website customers make a purchase, your merchant processor saves their data. Request this information to enable you to identify trends such as which products are preferred, average purchase price, which credit cards are most used, credit card versus debit card use and other information about your customers. Create an email registration form. When customers browse your website, they can register their email address in exchange for coupons, a newsletter, new product alerts or whatever you decide to use as an enticement. Monte Enbysk of Microsoft suggests businesses be creative and offer incentives like free tips or advice about products. He also recommends allowing browsers and customers to sign up for newsletters, but cautions they should have an opt-out option. Use cookies data. Cookies are bits of memory data that archive a web user’s browsing data to reopen a page quickly when revisited. Your website has the ability to place cookies on customers’ computers to track their browsing behavior while they are on your website. Ask your web designer how to access cookies. References Resources Writer Bio Owen Richason grew up working in his family’s small contracting business. He later became an outplacement consultant, then a retail business consultant. Richason is a former personal finance and business writer for “Tampa Bay Business and Financier. ” He now writes for various publications, websites and blogs.
Scraping Data from Website to Excel (Tutorial 2021) | Octoparse
You probably know how to use basic functions in Excel. It’s easy to do things like sorting, applying filters, making charts, and outlining data with Excel. You even can perform advanced data analysis using pivot and regression models. It becomes an easy job when the live data turns into a structured format. The problem is, how can we extract scalable data and put it into Excel? This can be tedious if you doing it manually by typing, searching, copying and pasting repetitively. Instead, you can achieve automated data scraping from websites to excel.
In this article, I will introduce several ways to save your time and energy to scrape web data into Excel.
Table of Contents
Getting web data using Excel Web Queries
Getting web data using Excel VBA
Automated Web Scraping Tools
Outsource Your Web Scraping Project
Disclaimer:
There many other ways to scrape from websites using programming languages like PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and etc. Here we just talk about how to scrape data from websites into excel for non-coders.
Except for transforming data from a web page manually by copying and pasting, Excel Web Queries is used to quickly retrieve data from a standard web page into an Excel worksheet. It can automatically detect tables embedded in the web page’s HTML. Excel Web queries can also be used in situations where a standard ODBC(Open Database Connectivity) connection gets hard to create or maintain. You can directly scrape a table from any website using Excel Web Queries.
The process boils down to several simple steps (Check out this article):
1. Go to Data > Get External Data > From Web
2. A browser window named “New Web Query” will appear
3. In the address bar, write the web address
(picture from)
4. The page will load and will show yellow icons against data/tables.
5. Select the appropriate one
6. Press the Import button.
Now you have the web data scraped into the Excel Worksheet – perfectly arranged in rows and columns as you like.
Most of us would use formula’s in Excel(e. g. =avg(… ), =sum(… ), =if(… ), etc. ) a lot, but less familiar with the built-in language – Visual Basic for Application a. k. a VBA. It’s commonly known as “Macros” and such Excel files are saved as a ** Before using it, you need to first enable the Developer tab in the ribbon (right click File -> Customize Ribbon -> check Developer tab). Then set up your layout. In this developer interface, you can write VBA code attached to various events. Click HERE ((v=office. 14)) to getting started with VBA in excel 2010.
Using Excel VBA is going to be a bit technical – this is not very friendly for non-programmers among us. VBA works by running macros, step-by-step procedures written in Excel Visual Basic. To scrape data from websites to Excel using VBA, we need to build or get some VBA script to send some requests to web pages and get returned data from these web pages. It’s common to use VBA with XMLHTTP and regular expressions to parse the web pages. For Windows, you can use VBA with WinHTTP or InternetExplorer to scrape data from websites to Excel.
With some patience and some practice, you would find it worthwhile to learn some Excel VBA code and some HTML knowledge to make your web scraping into Excel much easier and more efficient for automating the repetitive work. There’s a plentiful amount of material and forums for you to learn how to write VBA code.
For someone who is looking for a quick tool to scrape data off pages to Excel and doesn’t want to set up the VBA code yourself, I strongly recommend automated web scraping tools like Octoparse to scrape data for your Excel Worksheet directly or via API. There is no need to learn to program. You can pick one of those web scraping freeware from the list, and get started with extracting data from websites immediately and exporting the scraped data into Excel. Different web scraping tool has its pros and cons and you can choose the perfect one to fit your needs. The below video shows how to leverage an automated web scraping tool to extract web data to excel efficiently.
Check out this post and try out these TOP 30 free web scraping tools
If time is your most valuable asset and you want to focus on your core businesses, outsourcing such complicated web scraping work to a proficient web scraping team that has experience and expertise would be the best option. It’s difficult to scrape data from websites due to the fact that the presence of anti-scraping bots will restrain the practice of web scraping. A proficient web scraping team would help you get data from websites in a proper way and deliver structured data to you in an Excel sheet, or in any format you need.
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日本語記事：Webデータを活用！WebサイトからデータをExcelに取り込む方法Webスクレイピングについての記事は 公式サイトでも読むことができます。Artículo en español: Scraping de Datos del Sitio Web a ExcelTambién puede leer artículos de web scraping en el Website Oficial
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Video: Create Your First Scraper with Octoparse 8. X
Frequently Asked Questions about how to extract products from website
How do you collect data from a website?
Review your website traffic reports. … Ask your website designer to add a data form to your business website. … Retrieve data from your merchant processor. … Create an email registration form. … Use cookies data.
How do I extract data from a website to excel?
Getting web data using Excel Web QueriesGo to Data > Get External Data > From Web.A browser window named “New Web Query” will appear.In the address bar, write the web address. … The page will load and will show yellow icons against data/tables.Select the appropriate one.Press the Import button.Aug 2, 2021
How can I extract data from a website for free?
Besides that, the cloud service will allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.ScrapingBot.Data Scraper (Chrome)Web scraper.Scraper (Chrome)Outwit hub(Firefox)Dexi.io (formerly known as Cloud scrape)Webhose.io.Aug 3, 2021