Lead generation always plays an essential role in any successful business, since every business needs to get in touch with potential customers or cooperators. These leads can eventually help businesses to generate more revenue. There are thousands of websites that provide lead information, however. To grab high-quality leads that fit your business, you need the help of web scraping tools!
Web scraping is one of the most effective ways to collect leads in bulk. It can extract valuable data like email addresses, phone numbers, names, positions, etc., from unstructured pages, helping you to locate a particular business or person to create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns. In this article, we’ll introduce the top 10 leads scraping tools that can help you build your lead database.
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a no-coding web scraping solution for anyone to turn pages into structured data within clicks. Its auto-detection feature can automate scan the webpage and provide extractable lead information for users, rather than requiring users to select wanted data by hand. After selecting all needed data, Octoparse will generate a workflow without asking users to write scripts themselves. Thus, everyone can build reliable lead scrapers with clicks but no need to know how to read HTML files and code.
Meanwhile, Octoparse offers preset templates for most mainstream websites that contain lead information, such as LinkedIn and Google Maps. For users who want a more convenient experience in collecting leads, templates can be their perfect choice! By inputting the required parameters and click the button “Save & Run”, you can get lists of leads with information like country, job title, company name, email, location, etc., in minutes. Besides templates for particular websites, there are templates like Contact Details Scraper that can extract contact details from any website and its subpages.
Now, Octoparse provides both free and paid plans. Even the free plan is powerful enough for anyone building scrapers to generate leads on most platforms. In addition, paying for a plan can enhance your scraping experience, such as using Octoparse’s cloud servers to access leads data 24/7 and export them automatically.
2. Scrab.in
Scrab.in is a lead generation tool with a focus on LinkedIn leads. In a similar way to Octoparse, it is a no-code tool that generates leads on LinkedIn intuitively and actionably. You can also download lead information like emails, name and surname, job position, business, telephone, LinkedIn URL, etc., in Excel files to store the data on your computer. However, its free plan has only 500 scans and 100 visits per day. If you want to unleash its full potential in collecting leads, you need to upgrade to paid plans that go from $15 to $199 monthly.
3. Import.io
Import.io is a web scraping tool that claims you can get the data you need without touching a line of code. While you’re collecting leads with it, you can easily build a scraper with a few clicks away. It is also possible to scrape using Import.io’s APIs. The latter allows you to integrate a steady amount of web data into your business processes, applications, analysis tools, and visualization software.
In general, this tool is more suitable for medium and large enterprises that need to integrate scrapers into other applications. Moreover, the least expensive paid plan is priced at $399 per month, and there are no free plans.
4. Apify
Apify is a platform where you can find pre-built web scraping tools. Most of the tools are built by developers with a focus on specific websites. There are more than 170 lead generation scrapers available on Apify covering most mainstream websites, including Google Maps, Facebook Groups, Instagram, Yellow Pages, etc., for users to extract contact data at scale. You can try most of them for free, but some might require you to pay about $20/month after a 7-day trial.
5. ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that can render JavaScript to scrape any website. It also features a large proxy pool that can reduce your chances of being blocked while scraping data. However, because this is an API tool, you should have coding knowledge to make the most of use it, although it offers basic code samples of data extraction. ScrapingBee now only has paid plans pricing from $49/month to more than $999/month.
6. Zyte
Zyte is a company that provides a variety of web scraping tools and data services for businesses. Automatic Extraction is Zyte’s AI-powered solution for automatically parsing and extracting structured data. When you collect leads, you can select the data type to extract. Like most lead scraping tools, Zyte has a free 30-day trial for new users. After that, you need to pay $450 or $1000 monthly for its web data service. Due to its pricing, it might be a tool that suits businesses and enterprises that have higher data extraction needs.
7. FindThatLead
FindTheLead is an all-in-one lead generation tool that allows you to automate your prospecting. Its Prospector Tool for advanced audience research can get thousands of leads for you. What you need to do is just give a few parameters, and wait for the prospector to provide you with contact information from public sources. Then, you can apply this tool to enrich your database with qualified contacts. It also has a free plan for starters and paid plans pricing from $55 to $399 per month for huge needs in leads.
8. Mozenda
Mozenda is a data extraction platform that provides scraping solutions to turn web pages into data. It has a point-and-click feature that allows users to pull lead data from websites eliminating the need to write scripts or hire developers. After the scraping process is completed, you can export the lead data directly to CSV, XML, JSON, etc., for further use. You can try it for free for 30 days, after that, you can contact them and clear your needs to get the detailed paid plan.
9. Webscraper.io
Webscraper.io is a Chrome extension designed for regular and scheduled use to extract large amounts of data. It features a point-to-click interface that allows users to configure scraper by simply pointing and clicking on elements on the pages. It also automates data extraction with features like scheduler, API, and IP rotation. But these features are only available for paid plans. You can try it with a free 7-day trial first, and pay $50 to $300 monthly to unlock the automation features.
10. Python Libraries
Python must be one of the most effective approaches to scraping leads (if you know how to code, of course) because there is a rich ecosystem of Python libraries. For example, ‘requests’ for making HTTP requests and ‘BeautifulSoup’ for parsing HTML could simplify the process of web scraping. Here is a simplified example of using Python to scrape leads from LinkedIn:
import requestsimport json Replace these with your LinkedIn app credentialsclient_id = 'your_client_id'client_secret = 'your_client_secret'redirect_uri = 'your_redirect_uri' Set up authorization URLauthorization_url = f'https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/authorization?response_type=code&client_id={client_id}&redirect_uri={redirect_uri}&scope=r_liteprofile%20r_emailaddress&state=123456'print(f'Visit the following URL to authorize your application: {authorization_url}') After authorization, LinkedIn will redirect to your specified redirect_uri with a code parameterauthorization_code = input('Enter the authorization code from the redirect URI: ') Exchange authorization code for an access tokentoken_url = 'https://www.linkedin.com/oauth/v2/accessToken'token_data = { 'grant_type': 'authorization_code', 'code': authorization_code, 'redirect_uri': redirect_uri, 'client_id': client_id, 'client_secret': client_secret,}token_response = requests.post(token_url, data=token_data)access_token = json.loads(token_response.text)['access_token'] Use the access token to make API requestsapi_url = 'https://api.linkedin.com/v2/me'headers = {'Authorization': f'Bearer {access_token}'}response = requests.get(api_url, headers=headers) Print the user's profile dataprint('LinkedIn Profile Data:')print(json.dumps(response.json(), indent=2))Wrap up
In a digital era where information is paramount, finding the right tools to scrape leads can impact the success of marketing campaigns and sales performance. A great leads scraper will get the machine to finish all the dirty work in grabbing leads for you. So you can spend most of your time analyzing data to locate potential customers and partners. Eventually, you’re more likely to remain competitive in the market and achieve long-term success.
