Web scraping has since become a household term among various industries involved in online marketing in general or data analytics. In order to really get a good picture of how valuable web scraping and data analytics tools can be for plenty of individuals and business owners, you have to take the time to know what advantages they can readily derive from the activity.

And, mind you, they are many, with each serving as nothing less than a great boon for the growth of your business or improvement of your campaigns. The following are the four most compelling reasons why web scraping tools should not be absent from your arsenal. 

1. Gives you easy access to invaluable data.

Just ask anyone in the internet marketing and IT fields nowadays what’s the most precious resource that anyone can gain online, and most will probably not hesitate to tag data. Data science and analytics would not have been gained so much traction in such a short period of time otherwise. 

What makes most web scraping tools very convenient nowadays is that a lot of them are centered on automating the fundamental processes of web scraping. With the right proxy and web crawler software, you can practically achieve all your scraping needs once properly set up. This allows minimal manual from then on and you can have access to data that you can use to gain vital insights any business owner will usually have to pay for otherwise. 

2. Reduces the time to gather data.

Manual data extraction is very much possible, but who in their right mind would be willing to spend countless hours to collect vast amounts of data available online? A lot of web scraping tools, with the considerable speed with which they perform their functions, practically remove the need to do any manual work. And, you get it all for free in most cases.

A very good example is the jQuery-based scraper called Cheerio. It is one of the fastest web scraping tools around because it prioritizes simplicity above everything else. Not only that, but it is also very adaptable to your various data scraping needs, considering its versatile API and its ability to parse all kinds of HTML and XML documents. These qualities only ever serve as the keys to the time-saving qualities attributed to great web scrapers.

3. Paves the way to a treasure trove of leads.

If there’s one thing that most businesses can’t get enough of, it leads. Leads in the form of new customers or influencers only ever translate to more opportunities to grow your business and improve conversions. They, in short, are the keys to a business’s success. And web scrapers can practically hand it to you at marginal costs - that is, only a bit of your time. 

A very good example of a free web scraper that performs amazingly for lead generation is Octoparse. The tool has numerous functions to not only extract the data but also “cleanse” and “structure” these. These mean detecting and correcting corrupt or bad records and reformatting and organizing the data respectively. That said, these processes make it easier for you to make your final leads list, containing precious contact information of customers and influencers.

4. Helps businesses understand their clients and optimize their marketing campaigns. 

With the help of a website downloader, you can gather all the customer feedback, products offered, and strategies utilized by your competition. Just imagine how much this will benefit you. It will give you insights into what the problems faced by your target customers, which you can then proceed to introduce solutions to via your campaigns. 
 
A couple of powerful web scrapers like Parsehub can arguably be considered as superb data analysis tools too because of the sheer versatility of their platform. With Parsehub, you can easily get a free download of the data in formats more amenable for analytics like Excel.