J. Lee et al., Visualization and analysis of clickstream data of online stores for understanding Web merchandising, DATA M K D, 5(1-2), 2001, pp. 59-84
Clickstreams are visitors' paths through a Web site. Analysis of clickstrea
ms shows how a Web site is navigated and used by its visitors. Clickstream
data of online stores contains information useful for understanding the eff
ectiveness of marketing and merchandising efforts, such as how customers fi
nd the store, what products they see, and what products they purchase. In t
his paper, we present an interactive visualization system that provides use
rs with greater abilities to interpret and explore clickstream data of onli
ne stores. This system visualizes the effectiveness of Web merchandising fr
om two different points of view by using two different visualization techni
ques: visualization of sessions by using parallel coordinates and visualiza
tion of product performance by using starfield graphs. Furthermore, this sy
stem provides facilities for zooming, filtering, color-coding, dynamic quer
ying and data sampling. It also provides summary information along with vis
ualizations, and by maintaining a connection between visualizations and the
source database, it dynamically updates the summary information. To demons
trate how the presented visualization system provides capabilities for exam
ining online store clickstreams, we present a series of parallel coordinate
s and starfield visualizations that display clickstream data from an operat
ing online retail store. A framework for understanding Web merchandising is
briefly explained. A set of metrics referred to as micro-conversion rates,
which are defined for Web merchandising analysis in our previous work (Lee
et al., Electronic Markets, 2000), is also explained and used for the visu
alizations of online store effectiveness.