Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:

• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection

Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:

• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.

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Data Collection - Make a Plan

Planning for the data collection activity provides a stable and reliable data collection process in the Measure phase.

A well-planned activity ensures that your efforts and costs will not be in vain. Data collection typically involves three phases: pre-collection, collection and post-collection.

Pre-collection activities: Goal setting and forming operational definitions are some of the pre-collection activities that form the basis for systematic and precise data collection.

1.  Setting goals and objectives: Goal setting and defining objectives is the most important part of the pre-collection phase.

It enables teams to give direction to the data to be collected. The plan includes description of the Six Sigma project being planned. It lists out specific data that is required for the further steps in the process.

If there are no specific details as to the data needs, the data collection activity will not be within scope - and may become irrelevant over a period of time.

The plan must mention the rationale of data being collected as well as the final utilization.

2.  Define operational definitions: The team must clearly define what and how data has to be collected. An operational definition of scope, time interval and the number of observations required is very important.

If it mentions the methodology to be used, it can act a very important guideline to all data collection team members.

An understanding of all applicable information can help ensure that there no misleading data is collected, which may be loosely interpreted leading to a disastrous outcome.

3.  Repeatability, stability and accuracy of data: The repeatability of the data being collected is very important.

This means that when the same operator undertakes that same activity on a later date, it should produce the same output. Additionally, it is reproducible if all operators reach the same outcome.

Measurement systems should be accurate and stable, such that outcomes are the same with similar equipment over a period of time.

The team may carry out testing to ensure that there is no reduction in these factors.

Collection Activity

After planning and defining goals, the actual data collection process starts according to plan. Going by the plan ensures that teams achieve expected results consistently and accurately.

Training can be undertaken so as to ensure that all data collection agents have a common understanding of data being collected. Black Belts or team leaders can look over the process initially to provide any support needed.

For data collection over a longer period, teams need to ensure regular oversight to ensure that no collection activities are overlooked.

Post collection activities

Once collection activities are completed, the accuracy and reliability of the data has to be reviewed.

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