Mining + scraping · Chapel Hill, NC
Data mining and web scraping in Chapel Hill
A town built around a university has a calendar: move-in, football weekends, Festifall, graduation, summer lull. We gather your records into one dated table so each stretch of that calendar shows what it did for your sales.
Mining Chapel Hill's academic calendar into your sales
Shops on Franklin Street and Rosemary Street see sharp swings with the semester. A bookstore, café or tutor can hold sales in a register export, orders in an inbox and appointments in a calendar.
We combine them and tag each row with its date and source. You can then sort by week of the semester and compare year to year.
When the dates are in one table, you can compare home weekends with away weekends and decide how much to stock.
Festifall vendors and street-closure days
In 2022 Festifall closed Church Street on three October Saturdays and ran a vendor market on Franklin Street. Artists and makers who sell there may record sales in a notebook or on a phone, and online orders in a separate app.
One table lets you compare each festival Saturday against your regular weeks.
A good Saturday can hide a poor one if both are lumped into the monthly total. Per-day rows keep the contrast.
Scraping public data for health and professional services
Educational services, professional and technical services, and health care are the largest employment sectors in Chapel Hill. A therapist, coach, tutor or consultant here may not list prices, but some competitors post rates and review counts on public pages.
A small script collects those posted figures and the date we saw them. We stay on public pages and within each site's terms.
Most of these figures come from a competitor's own site, which means we copy only what they chose to publish. Nothing is inferred or guessed.
One table, then cleaning
After combining, duplicates show up: the same student under a school email and a personal one. Stage two merges them so counts are fair.
From there, analysis can answer questions such as which month's new customers came back.
None of this requires you to change tools. Your register, calendar and inbox stay as they are while we work from exports.
Questions from Chapel Hill owners
I only have summer and fall records. Is that enough?
It is a start. We build the table from what exists, and each added month improves the comparison.
Can you separate student customers from year-round residents?
If your records hold something that tells them apart, such as an email domain or a form question, we add a column for it. We would ask first whether that split is something you want to track.
Do I need to share customer emails with you?
Only as much as the table needs. We discuss which columns matter before we open any file.
Sources for the facts on this page: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Wikipedia · Festifall Arts Markets return to downtown Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill Community Arts & Culture
Bring your semester-shaped numbers
Book a free call of 15 or 30 minutes. Tell us how your year rises and falls and we will say how we would capture it.