Web Scraping — is the automated collection of information from websites using special programs. For example, instead of manually visiting hundreds of pages and writing down prices, product names, or ad texts, you can run a program that collects this data automatically.
The collected information can be saved to a spreadsheet or another convenient format and then used for analysis.
Why Web Scraping Is Used in Traffic Arbitrage
In traffic arbitrage, web scraping is mainly used to find information about advertising and competitors.
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Finding advertising ideas: special services collect ads from advertising networks. A media buyer can see which creatives, texts, and landing pages other advertisers use.
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Competitor analysis: information can be collected from advertisers’ websites — for example, their offers, prices, texts, and landing pages.
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Market analysis: if you need to study a large number of offers, web scraping helps quickly collect information from different sources and compare it.
In traffic arbitrage, web scraping is often called parsing — both terms are usually used to describe automated data collection.
What Can Be Collected
Web scraping can be used to collect texts, images, prices, links, advertisements, keywords, and other data found on websites.
Important: websites may restrict automated data collection using CAPTCHAs, request limits, and blocks. In addition, collected data may be incomplete or outdated, so it should be checked before use.
