Online Visitor Classification and Unified Creation With Clickstream Data

In a traditional store environment, it is possible for sales people to differentiate serious shoppers from window shoppers by simple observation. ‘Serious’ shoppers are very focused on looking for a specific product or two, whereas ‘window’ shoppers look at many different products and categories. Sales personnel can identify and decide to help serious shoppers and ignore window shoppers. However in a virtual environment, there are no sales people, and customers use multiple devices such as computers, smart phones, and tablets to browse websites and make purchases.This study explains how clickstream data can be retrieved, processed, and used to classify customer visits into categories such as buying, browsing, searching, and knowledge building. It also explains a way to create unified user profiles by combining their visits through multiple devices. By using Adobe clickstream data of a telecom company’s website, some measures are derived and used in a clustering analysis to group visitors into a few categories. Such a categorization of visits helps marketers to identify likely buyers, design more effective and customized promotions, and build more effective web content.