How to Extract Web Data Using Apify and Make.com: A No-Code Approach

Data extraction from the internet has become increasingly important for businesses and individuals alike. Whether you’re looking to aggregate social media posts, generate leads, or compile information from various websites, having the right tools can streamline the process without requiring coding knowledge.

Understanding Apify and Its Capabilities

Apify is a powerful web scraping platform that offers tremendous flexibility through what they call “actors” – pre-built scrapers designed for specific websites or use cases. These actors are available through the Apify marketplace, created by developers who have built specialized scrapers for different platforms.

The platform offers various types of actors for:

• Social media scraping (Instagram, Twitter, etc.)
• Lead generation (including platforms like Apollo)
• Website data extraction
• And much more

While some actors are free, most have a small cost associated with them, typically priced per number of results (like $2-10 per 1,000 results) or on a pay-per-result basis.

Practical Example: Instagram Hashtag Scraping

Let’s walk through a practical example of extracting Instagram posts associated with specific hashtags:

1. Sign up for Apify (you get $5 free credit monthly)
2. Navigate to the Apify store
3. Search for “Instagram Hashtag Scraper”
4. Configure the actor with your desired hashtags (e.g., AI agents, AI automation)
5. Set parameters like post type (posts or reels) and number of items to extract
6. Adjust run options as needed (memory allocation, timeouts, etc.)

Integrating with Make.com for Database Storage

While you can run scrapers directly within Apify, integrating with Make.com (formerly Integromat) allows you to automatically send the extracted data to a database like Airtable:

1. In Make.com, add the Apify integration module
2. Set up “Watch Actor runs” to monitor when your scraper runs
3. Add an Apify webhook that connects to your specific actor
4. Use “Get Dataset Items” to retrieve the scraped data
5. Connect to Airtable and map the data fields to your database columns

The scraped data can include information such as captions, hashtags, post URLs, account names, and usernames – all automatically populated in your database.

Cost Considerations

The cost for using these tools is relatively low. With the example shown, scraping 20 Instagram posts would cost just pennies at a rate of $2.30 per 1,000 results. Apify offers a standard plan that provides $40 worth of usage credits monthly.

Beyond Social Media

While the example focused on Instagram hashtags, this approach can be applied to various use cases:

• Grant information aggregation
• Lead generation
• Competitor analysis
• Content research
• Market trends monitoring

The combination of Apify’s extensive actor marketplace and Make.com’s automation capabilities makes it possible to extract almost any kind of data from the internet and store it in structured formats without writing a single line of code.

For businesses and individuals looking to harness the power of web data, this no-code approach offers an accessible and efficient solution that can be customized to meet specific data extraction needs.