An Algorithm to Calculate the Expected Value of an Ongoing User Session

Abstract

The fiercely competitive web-based electronic commerce environment has made necessary the application of intelligent methods to gather and analyze information collected from consumer web sessions. Knowledge about user behavior and session goals can be discovered from the information gathered about user activities, as tracked by web clicks. Most current approaches to customer behavior analysis study the user session by examining each web page access. Knowledge of web navigator behavior is crucial for web site sponsors to evaluate the performance of their sites. Nevertheless, knowing the behavior is not always enough. Very often it is also necessary to measure sessions value according to business goals perspectives. In this paper an algorithm is given that makes it possible to calculate at each point of an ongoing navigation not only the possible paths a viewer may follow but also calculates the potential value of each possible navigation.