Getting structured data for reporting in Google Sheets

How to get structured data for reporting

Your company has decided to standardize spreadsheets and reporting on Google Sheets. That’s great, but first, you need to get the data you want to report on. If that data resides on the web, then you can get structured data with data extraction.

Data extraction is sometimes referred to as web scraping, but it’s much more than that. All you need is one URL to get started.

For this example, we want to report on Samsung product sentiment on Amazon.com.

First:
we search on Amazon for Samsung products.

Then copy and paste the resulting search URL into Import.io.

Since this is just the first page of products, Import.io can tell that more pages exist and gives you the option to add all of them.

After the data extraction process completes, Import.io allows you to select what data to extract into as many columns as you need.

We only wanted the product name and rating info this time and we’ll download those two columns to an Excel spreadsheet.

Now, you have a great spreadsheet of customer sentiment data to the format and integrate into your Google Sheets database using Sheetgo. Read through the simple steps in this blog post on how to easily upload Excel to Google Sheets.

Since customer sentiment continuously changes, you can schedule this to run every day or even every hour. Import.io also provides an optional hourly, daily, or weekly report on just what has changed to make it easier to update your reports. So, once you run this extraction, you are set to receive the latest data for tracking sentiment ongoing.