Top 5 Web Scraping Case Studies & Success Stories in 2024

The web contains valuable insights for vendors, businesses, and consumers. Web scraping tools enable businesses to extract web data from various sources to make the most of web data. Web scraping has a wide range of applications in various industries; however, using the technology in the right way is important to achieve value from it.

In this article, we focus on 5 successful web scraping case studies from different industries and their business outcomes to help you achieve maximum value from the technology.

Web data extraction

1. Advantage Solutions: Omnichannel solutions for brands and retailers

Advantage Solutions offers sales, marketing, and retailer services to help brands and retailers increase sales in-store and online. Canopy, a brand of Advantage Solutions, extracts and merges data from various sources to provide customers with a comprehensive view of their data.

1.1. Challenge

Websites use different anti-scraping techniques to protect their web data from malicious activities. Collecting publicly available web data from multiple sources without changing the IP address caused Canopy to be detected and blocked from web sources. Canopy started working with a proxy server company to circumvent IP bans. However, to use proxy servers businesses need to change their IP addresses constantly for each new connection request to eliminate the risk of being detected. After a while, Canopy used-up all the IP addresses assigned by the proxy server’s IP pool and ran into the same issue.

1.2. Solution

Canopy used Bright Data’s Residential Proxies and Datacenter IPs to collect required data for their customers.

1.3. Business impact of the solution

Canopy was able to access and collect online customer data across multiple retail portals by using residential and datacenter proxies. This helped the company to provide a one-stop-shop eCommerce data where customers could access all the information they needed.

Recruitment

2. Mathison: Centralized talent network for recruiters 

Mathison is an all-in-one DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) platform that assists businesses with their hiring processes.

2.1. Challenge

Mathison gathers candidates’ data from different web sources, such as recruitment websites, like Glassdoor or Salary.com, or social media platforms like LinkedIn, to create a unified talent pool that helps recruiters to manage their diverse hiring activities. The company had difficulty accessing region-specific data and bypassing website anti-scraping mechanisms such as IP blockers, CAPTCHA blockers, or honeypots.

2.2. Solution

Mathison used Bright Data’s Data Collector to collect massive amounts of candidate public data from targeted platforms.

2.3. Business impact of the solution

With data collector, the company was able to: 

• Simplify the data collection process, and reduce the time spent manually collecting candidate profile data. 
• Automate the building and maintaining datasets processes. 
• Match candidates in appropriate positions.
• Enable data-driven decision-making strategy of hiring.

Marketing

3. Reddico: Up-to-date SEO insights

Reddico is an SEO agency that offers consultancy and SEO technology to their clients in different industries to solve technical challenges and automate labor-intensive tasks.

3.1. Challenge

According to the study, the number one position on a Google search receives 33 ¹  percent of all search traffic. Businesses use SEO to analyze content performance and increase visibility/rank on Google Search. SEO tools crawl multiple vast amounts of webpages for different business purposes, such as backlink tracking and providing localized content. However, accessing and scraping large amounts of web data is difficult.

3.2. Solution

Reddico leveraged a data collector solution to collect web data on a large scale without geo-restrictions.

3.3. Business impact of the solution

With Bright Data’s Data collector, Reddico was able to: 

• Collect large-scale web data from any region in the world.
• Get more accurate data from search engines much faster.
• Get real-time SERP data and provide up-to-date SEO insights to their customers.

Sales

4. e.fundamentals: Digital shelf analytics for eCommerce growth

e.fundamentals is a CommerceIQ company that helps Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands analyze, measure, and optimize their eCommerce performance.

4.1. Challenge

The company collects data from hundreds of retailers and turns it into actionable insights to assist brands in optimizing their digital shelf performance and driving sales. e.fundamentals needed access to public online data on over 1.5 million products from hundreds of retailers. The company was challenged in accessing and gathering the online data it needed.

4.2. Solution

e.fundamentals leveraged Bright Data Residential IPs and Bright Data Web Unlocker to collect necessary public online data from various sources.

4.3. Business impact of the solution

With the use of Residential IPs and Web Unlocker, the company could: 

• Gather vast amounts of public web data to feed its analytics pipelines. 
• Accelerate the data collection process. 
• Bright Data’s data collection products helped e.fundamentals triple in size last year.

Travel 

5. Railofy: Personalized travel experience for passengers

India has the third-largest ² railway system in the world. It transports approximately 13,169 ³  passengers per day. Railofy is a travel tech start-up that offers passengers solutions such as online food delivery service to train seats, ticket booking, and travel guarantee for the waitlist. 

5.1. Challenge

Railofy notifies waitlisted train passengers of available seats and ensures they reach their destinations at the lowest price. However, the company needed help to collect a vast amount of online passenger data to optimize its prices and offer personalized pricing. 

5.2. Solution

Railofy used Bright Data’s Datacenter IPs and Residential IPs to collect required  online travel data such as flight dates, number of seats left, ticket prices, etc. Extracted data enabled the company to offer flight options to waitlisted passengers at a similar railway ticket cost. 

Business impact of the solution

• Access public online travel data. 
• Adjust ticket prices based on the current market situation.
• Formulate data-driven strategies. 
• Predict India’s railway and airline networks.

Transparency statement:

AIMultiple serves numerous emerging tech companies including Bright Data.

Further Reading

• Web Scraping tools: Data-driven Benchmarking
• Email scraping: overview, use cases, challenges & best practices
• Headless Browsers in Web Scraping: Challenges & Best Practices

If you believe your company could benefit from a web scraping solution, look through our list of web crawlers to find the best vendor for you.

For guidance to choose the right solution, you can reach out to us:

External Links

• 1.  Dean, Brian (October 14, 2022). ”Here’s What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate”. Backlinko. Retrieved November 23, 2022.
• 2. Sun, Shangliao (May 2, 2022). ”Indian railway passenger traffic FY 2010-2021”. statista. The page last updated November 16, 2022 Retrieved November 23, 2022.
• 3. “Indian Railways”. Wikipedia. The page last updated November 16, 2022 Retrieved November 23, 2022.