The Impact of Site Structure and User Environment on Session Reconstruction in Web Usage Analysis

The analysis of user behavior on the Web presupposes a reliable reconstruction of the users' navigational activities. Cookies and server-generated session identifiers have been designed to allow a faithful session reconstruction. However, in the absence of reliable methods, analysts must rely on heuristics methods (a) to identify unique visitors to a site, and (b) to distinguish among the activities of such users during independent sessions. The characteristics of the site, such as the site structure, as well as the methods used for data collection (e.g., the existence of cookies and reliable synchronization across multiple servers) may necessitate the use of different types of heuristics. In this study, we extend our work on the reliability of sessionizing mechanisms, by investigating the impact of site structure on the quality of constructed sessions. Specifically, we juxtapose sessionizing on a frame-based and a frame-free version of a site. We investigate the behavior of cook...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Bettina Berendt, Bamshad Mobasher, Miki Nakagawa, Myra Spiliopoulou
• Keywords: Data Mining, Faithful Session Reconstruction, KDD 2002, Session Reconstruction Heuristics, Session Reconstruction Quality