Programmatic: how to build a scraping bot... without knowing how to code? 🤔

In 2024, at the very beginning of the GreyFox Ads adventure, we wanted an exclusive feature to stand out from the crowd of other programmatic ad networks.

By analyzing the market, we quickly realized that when it came to carbon footprint, many technologies focused on classic variables: connection type, creative weight, timing, publishers' ads.txt files… But none of them measured whether the publisher's site itself was well-optimized as a whole.

And then, 💥 it clicked: why not create our own Green Score🌱, partly based on Lighthouse scores (the Google Chrome tool highly popular among webmasters and SEO analysts) as a proxy for digital efficiency and sobriety?

But manually retrieving these scores for the Top 500 French websites would have taken days... Unless we built a scraping bot!

One slight technical issue, though: we don't know how to code 😅

That's when we had a slightly crazy idea: what if we asked ChatGPT to code the bot for us? 🤖

After 3 hours of relentless effort, a good thirty errors corrected via screenshots, and a lot of coffee… ChatGPT had coded a custom scraping bot for us, capable of extracting Desktop/Mobile Lighthouse scores for the top 500 French sites 😲

Sure, it's Level 1 scraping, but already a massive efficiency booster 💪

The takeaway: even if you're not a developer, thanks to LLMs, innovation is just a matter of curiosity. If you work in product or media and need to extract specific data, ChatGPT can become your best technical assistant.
Since then, we've evolved our Green Score🌱 to factor in the [Bid Request/page] ratio of each site (to block MFAs) 😁

At GreyFox Ads, we rely heavily on ingenuity to push boundaries in programmatic (it's our own little extra touch of soul 🤘)"

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At GreyFox Ads, we believe the quality OpenWeb brings real efficiency to advertisers.

We are a human-sized Adnetwork that helps Media Traders outside of France to address the French market with all our deep market knowledge focused in one "Master Curated Deal".
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