A New Similarity Measure to Understand Visitor Behavior in a Web Site

The behavior of visitors browsing in a web site offers a lot of information about their requirements and the way they use the respective site. Analyzing such behavior can provide the necessary information in order to improve the web site's structure. The literature contains already several suggestions on how to characterize web site usage and to identify the respective visitor requirements based on clustering of visitor sessions. Here we propose to combine visitor behavior with the content of the respective web pages and the similarity between different page sequences in order to define a similarity measure between different visits. This similarity serves as input for clustering of visitor sessions. The application of our approach to a bank's web site and its visitor sessions shows its potential for internet-based businesses.