How to break up with manual data collection
How much time are you wasting on manual repetitive tasks, like, data collection? It doesn’t have to be hard. Here's the simplest way to collect web data.
Marketers spend hours on routine tasks, from market research to competitor price monitoring. Data analysts gather, clean, and study tons of data sets to solve problems on a daily basis. There's one thing in common from entry-level marketers to data analysts to senior programmers: data collection is not so easy.
Even for developers who have a solid knowledge of web scraping, it brings a lot of pain and sleepless nights to get data from websites. As a matter of fact, only 0.0013% provides APIs that allow applications to access data out of 1.9 billion websites in the world. Moreover, some tiny changes in webpage structure require different algorithms to collect data, which makes web data collection even more challenging and time-consuming.
Low-Code Web Scraping
Low code is a software development approach that enables to build applications with minimal hand-coding efforts. This method allows you to collect data from websites with little intervention. Listly is a low-code web scraping platform for everyone. In a nutshell, its algorithm automatically analyzes the structure of web pages and organizes data in Excel file formats. This means that you can convert any website, anything you see on a browser — from YouTube comments, product information, photos, URLs, you just name it.
Small changes can dramatically improve your work performance, and web scraping is an excellent start in achieving that. Here’s an outline of the steps you can take to break up with manual data collection and simplify your workflow.
Listly: Tips for getting started
Install the extension and hit the Add to Chrome button when prompted. Once the installation is complete, you might want to refresh your Chrome browser to make sure the extension is working. From here, all you have to do is find a website you want to scrape and click on the extension’s icon. That’s it — you’re now ready to extract data from any web page.
1. Install Chrome Extension
Important: Make sure you allow a permission request after installation
2. Click Listly's extension icon on your target website
Choose LISTLY WHOLE or LISTLY PART
3. Download data into Excel
Select a tab you'd like to scrape and download data
Use Case Scenario: Lead Generation
Data can be an essential index for decision-making or insights for your business. More and more people are not using web scraping services to generate sales leads, source product information, collect reviews, track daily logs, and so forth.
For example, let's say you're generating leads to grow your business. To help save you some precious time, we looked at one of the much-loved location data platforms: Foursquare.
Once you hit LISTLY WHOLE after searching for a keyword, your data will be ready to download; next up is simply clicking the EXCEL button.
Now, you've got everything at your fingertips. Spend less time collecting data and more time on the things that matter to you.