The 18 best tools for growth hacking and web scraping

Getting qualified leads is a real challenge for companies, but the process of getting them is often long and tedious. Fortunately, it's now 2021, and hundreds of nocode tools have appeared over the last few years to support sales teams in these tasks. Targeting, making contacts, sending reminders, updating your CRM, so many tasks that today could be automated thanks to numerous tools. Much more than a simple time saving, it is also a way to improve your prospecting with more precise targeting, mandatory retargeting, fewer errors and reduced response times. These tools allow you to automate certain stages of your sales process, and thus establish a real prospecting dynamic: webscrapping, retargeting, marketing automation, prospecting on LinkedIn, CRM, etc.

In this article, we are more specifically interested in tools dedicated to the automation of data collection: web scraping tools. Find out which are the best tools to automate the collection of data on your prospects: e-mail address, telephone number, function, etc.

What is webscraping?

Web scraping is the practice of extracting data from the internet. Whether it is from a website, a search engine, social networks, etc. Also known as harvesting, this technique consists of retrieving a certain amount of information using software, in order to be able to reuse it.

Your manager asks you to find the email address of a prospect and your first reflex will be to go to the company's website to try to find the typical structure of the company's emails: local part, @, domain name. And most of the time, after wasting several minutes or even hours, you end up receiving an error message telling you that the address cannot be found.

This is where webscraping tools come in to save you time and productivity! Automating this process allows you to collect massive, more reliable and structured data. No more Ctrl + C / Ctrl + V (Cmd for Mac lovers), bots take care of filtering the internet, going from one page to another, identifying and retrieving the data you asked for. This is called "crawling", referring to the process of exploring web pages.

Web scraping practices

Web scraping and negative SEO

Web scraping is a computer technique used to meet many needs. First of all, it is used to retrieve content from a competitor's site to quickly boost one's own site. Indeed, some companies use it to improve their SEO content strategy and thus increase their natural traffic thanks to relevant web content: this is known as "negative SEO". Companies divert traffic to their site and take a position on your search results. Fortunately, this copy and paste approach is long gone, and search engines such as Google sanction this kind of practice: SEO penalties can go as far as blacklisting the site.

Web scraping and commercial prospecting

As you will have understood, web scraping is also used to improve the commercial strategies of companies. As we have seen, it is a way of collecting data to enrich your prospecting, by recovering e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, functions, company size, turnover, etc. This is a great way to enrich and update your CRM.

Web scraping and competitive intelligence

Web scraping is also used for competitive intelligence. Collect data from several competing sites to study your market positioning, compare your web, marketing and content strategies, or monitor price variations and changes in offers.

Top web scrapping tools to extract data on your prospects

Webscraper tools to retrieve prospect information

Let's say you are looking for prospects in the restaurant industry. One way to get information would be to go to a site like the Yellow Pages and contact individual establishments. The problem is that you would have to go through the site page by page, record by record, copy data by hand, etc. With scraping, you can extract a large amount of data from such directories.

Small volume scraping

1 - Octoparse : allows you to extract website data in 3 steps: you enter the URL of the site you wish to extract data from, you click on the data you wish to extract, you execute the extraction and retrieve the data.    

2 - ParseHub : same extraction system as Octoparse: URL, targeting, downloading.

3 - SpiderPro : a very easy to use tool, you can retrieve the data you are interested in with a simple click on the site. The data is organised and downloadable as a JSON or CSV file. The advantage is that downloading SpiderPro costs only $38!

4 - Datanyze : for simple export of email and phone numbers

5 - Simple Scraper: exporting multiple data from websites

6 - Sumo: helps generate more traffic, collect more emails and convert more customers.

Mass Scraping

7 - Prospect.io: find emails, launch and automate marketing campaigns.

8 - Drop contact : ideal tool for enriching your databases

9 - DataMiner: to export data in mass from search engines

10 - Import .io: a very complete but more complex scraping tool.

11 - Agenty : competitive intelligence on prices, products, barcodes, competitive web technologies, lead generation, etc. For web scraping professionals

Scraping data from networks (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)

12 - Waalaxy: get the email addresses and phone numbers of your linkedin contacts and program automated prospecting scenarios.

13 - Phantombuster : deploy a growth hacking strategy by monitoring the activity of your various networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Quora, Medium, etc.)

Web scraping extensions and plugins

Here are two Chrome extensions that can make it easier to expert data from Google.

14 - Webscraper .io : with a simple point-and-click interface, the ability to extract thousands of records from a website takes only a few minutes of scraper configuration.

15 - Scraper : a very simple (but limited) data mining extension designed to facilitate online research when you need to get data quickly.

Filtering tool for scraping

16 - Prospectwith: Before exporting your data, find companies by defining precise search criteria such as size, turnover, location, sector, etc.

Tools for finding email addresses

17 - FindEmails .com: find the emails of an entire company and check their validity with this tool.  

18 - hunter .io: find existing email addresses simply by entering the company's domain name.

Is web page scraping legal?

What the law says

The subject is extremely complex, not least because the web has no borders. In France, here are the contested practices in data scraping:

- Lack of information to those canvassed

- Lack of consent from those canvassed by email, telephone, etc.

- Failure to respect people's right to object

Collecting data from Internet users, even if publicly accessible on the Internet, may in some cases not be in compliance with the Data Protection Act and the RGPD. This practice concerns several disciplines and therefore cannot be apprehended in the same way according to different branches of law.

Generally speaking, if the extraction of data is permitted, companies using these practices must remain vigilant about the conditions of re-use of this data, as provided for by the CNIL: origin of the data, consent, respect for the right to object, data retention, RGPD obligations, etc.

Our recommendations and best practices at Digidop

1 - Avoid unfair collection methods: the use of data that has been collected without people's knowledge is in any case a very inefficient method of prospecting. Receiving a commercial email out of the blue, without any initial contact or interest on the part of the recipient, is neither effective nor legal.

2 - Favour direct contact to obtain real and binding consent from the prospect.

3 - Use transparent data collection forms:

4 - Deploy a "permission marketing" type approach aimed at creating a real relationship with your prospects. The aim is not to try to sell them your product at all costs, but rather to take an interest in theirs.

5 - Give priority to enriching and updating your professional database.

6 - Automate the deletion of contacts that have been inactive for more than 3 years.

7 - Include an unsubscribe link in your marketing emails: explaining why they are receiving this data, who sent the email, etc.