Lesson 2 of 8

Lesson 2.4.2

Turn an exhibitor PDF into a clean table

8 min read4 min videoIntermediate

What this costs

Charged per row extracted, then website resolution on top.

Before you start

A show guide, exhibitor directory or catalogue as a PDF.

Show guides are the highest intent lists in B2B and they are almost always locked inside a PDF, which is exactly why no database has them. Extracting one well is a repeatable advantage, and the cleanup matters as much as the extraction.

  1. 1

    Get the richest version of the document

    The full show guide beats the web exhibitor list, because it carries stand numbers, hall, category and often a description. Those are your free qualifiers.

  2. 2

    Upload it and say what one row is

    One row per exhibiting company. Say it explicitly, because a show guide also contains a schedule, a floor plan and adverts.

  3. 3

    Name the fields on the page

    Company name, stand number, hall, category, country, description. Take everything the document offers, even fields you have no use for yet.

  4. 4

    Strip the furniture

    Page headers, footers, section titles and sponsor adverts arrive as rows. Filter them out before resolving anything. This is the step people skip and then blame the extraction for.

  5. 5

    Normalise the names

    Show guides list trading names, sometimes in capitals, sometimes with a country suffix. Normalise before you resolve domains, or your resolution rate drops for no good reason.

  6. 6

    Resolve to domains, then deduplicate

    Large exhibitors appear several times, once per brand or region. Domain level dedup collapses those correctly.

  7. 7

    Keep the event as a column

    Event name, date and the stand number. This is the personalisation, and it is worth more than anything you could enrich afterwards.

Did not strip page furniture

What you see
Rows called Hall 3 and Platinum Sponsors
The fix
Filter the obvious junk before resolving anything. It is cheap now and expensive later.

Resolved domains before normalising names

What you see
Low resolution rate on legitimate companies
The fix
Normalise casing and strip country suffixes first.

Deduplicated on the exhibitor name

What you see
One company kept three times under three brands
The fix
Deduplicate on the resolved domain.

Dropped stand number and category

What you see
A generic list you could have bought anywhere
The fix
Those fields are the entire reason to use this source. Keep them.

Check yourself

0 of 2 answered

1.What is the step people skip when extracting a show guide?

2.Why normalise exhibitor names before resolving domains?

Answer all 2, then open Deep Search: one company in, every lookalike out to tick this lesson off.

Try it yourself

Find the show guide PDF for an event in your market. Extract it, strip the furniture, resolve domains and deduplicate.

You have done it when
A table where every row is a real exhibiting company with a stand number and a resolved domain.
Credit budget
One document, plus website resolution on the misses.

Related and next

Recipes that use this skill

This lesson is written and complete. Its screen recording is still to come, and the written walkthrough is designed to stand on its own without one.