Data is a gold mine for your company, in a corporate world driven by information-driven decision-making. Knowing where to find the right data can help you lead your business and beat the competition. However, what is the best way to get the correct data set? Is it better to outsource web scraping or solving it in-house with your developers? What are the benefits of each option? In this post, we answer some of these key questions.
Advantages of extracting data from the web
The public web is usually infinite: one of the advantages of extracting data from the web is being able to collect data at scale and tailored to the needs of each company.
Usually, certain companies require a large amount of data and their web scrapers can collect them from various websites and information sources. They don’t always ask the simple question of why outsource web scraping services.
But the reality is that not all companies have the capacity to handle this internally, while those companies that prefer to do it on their own do not always know how to do it correctly because they do not manage to acquire the specific know-how. For this reason, outsourcing this business process is the optimal approach to solving this problem. Working with an outsourcing company to handle your web scraping needs offers tremendous benefits.
Main reasons to outsource Web Scraping to a professional service provider
- Count on a better infrastructure and forget about maintenance: Starting your own internal web scraping process can solve some data collection problems with a closed software package. However, without the right hardware and software for web scraping, you won’t be able to run the process as efficiently as needed. Extracting large data sets will require custom-trained scripts, algorithms, and software to accomplish a task. Even if you decide to buy an API, you will still need to train a team to handle this task and configure your IT infrastructure to accommodate this additional process. On the other hand, if you decide to partner with an outsourcing company, you won’t have to worry about any of these preparations, as your provider will have the right technology and will take care of all the technical aspects of delivering the requested data. The best news is that you forget about the regular maintenance and technical support infrastructure, freeing up time for other, higher-priority tasks.
- Work with experienced scraping professionals: Hiring new developers may be an option. However, you will need to invest time and money in onboarding and training, which can be quite complex if you are not sure how to proceed. If you want web scraping professionals, work with an outsource web scraping company. Most web scraping outsourcing providers have a list of experienced and knowledgeable web scraping developers who do all the work for you. They will take care of the data extraction and cleansing processes so that your data is ready the way you want it to be.
- Acquire a fully scalable service to your business: In House web scraping and data collection is not always easy to scale. Even if you already have a piece of equipment available, the expansion will still consume a large part of your budget and resources. You will need to train more people, obtain additional software licenses, and increase your hardware and bandwidth. If you want to skip all these difficulties to do your web scraping in-house, pass it on to your preferred outsourcing company. This way, you can easily scale up or down based on your business needs and get the expected return on investment.
- Save (hidden) costs by outsourcing instead of using canned tools: Many of the tools have associated coding that takes time to learn and address very general problems. Although a developer could learn them gradually and manually, this would not only delay the solutions, but many times they would not be oriented to the more strategic problems that need to be solved. It is not enough to have technical mastery of the tool, but rather a vision and strategic understanding of the business in the solution to be implemented. Learning that may require years of experience and high costs of resources and data management. And while you could create a workflow with several APIs running at the same time and web scraping scripts are highly modifiable, how flexible can you make the tool? Remember that these tools were created to solve some general business problems and the requirements engineering of your business was not configured for them, you do not have the sources of information loaded or the thousands of sites that you need to scrape, nor is the tool going to understand your need to deliver clean, accurate data to you if it’s not 100% configured and integrated. Thus, outsourcing to a service company will save you thousands of dollars. You will see the benefits of having integrated solutions that allow you to reduce these costs, reduce operational times, and make the value chain much more efficient.
- Improve the quality of the data you regularly obtain: Unfortunately, not all the data you collect from the web is clean, organized, or useful. After the scraping process, there will still be additional steps like cleaning, organizing, and maintaining the data. This means that a great deal of manpower and resources will be taken out of your business if you decide to run it in-house. This is one of the reasons why outsourcing web scraping makes much more sense in cost-benefit terms. You’ll have less hassle, and once the data you need is available, you’ll receive it from your outsourcing provider clean, organized, and ready to use.
- Have an uninterrupted flow of data: The goal of an outsourcing company is to provide services to its customers. Considering this purpose, you can be sure that you will receive data sets as frequently and consistently as you need. This continuous flow of data into your business can help you get more done, conceptualize more products or services, market to more people, or increase your sales. Thus, you can concentrate on the most important processes of your business. You can simply request regular reports or updates from your outsource web scraping partner to learn more about how your web scraping is going and receive the personalized presentation of the data you need once it’s ready for you.
Why Scraping Pros Should Be Your Service Provider
Scraping Pros is a strongly focused service with a team of experienced professionals handling every step of the process for the client. Our team automates tedious manual processes, freeing up time and resources for your company. With this integrated solution, we can guide you through every step of the process without requiring extra learning time, computing resources, or other costs.
As a personalized solution, we carry out a data extraction tailored to each client, integrating the very specific requirements of each client and giving them absolute flexibility for their business. The main advantages of our service are:
- Economic: Our operating costs are very low for the potential benefits that you will extract from the solutions and the data that you will be able to monitor for your business.
- Experience: We have more than 15 years of experience in web scraping and, with our world-class technical capabilities and resources, we provide high-quality data extraction services.
- Scalability: We have the resources and infrastructure to handle large-scale data extraction projects, both for large, medium, and small clients, at a low cost.
- Personalized attention, compliance, and project management: With our personalized outsource web scraping service you will have the web data you need in real-time, and you will be able to make informed decisions quickly and safely. We extract the data you need for your business, tailored to each client and with a personalized delivery (including information about competitors and their products, prices, and promotions, among other types of data). In addition, we comply with all the ethical and legal standards of web scraping.
In summary, our solutions have high quality, support, and maintenance. You will not have to worry about the complexity and automation of the technology associated with Web Scraping, and you will free up time and resources to deal with your objectives and strategic goals, without neglecting the technical aspects to achieve them.
