Modeling and explaining the growth patterns over time of country-specific website clickstream metrics

Adding to the growing stream of research on clickstream analysis, this research investigates the traffic growth from website launch for country-specific Web sites of a multinational organization in Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Several secondary sources of data are used to examine the potential influence of culture, infrastructure, and environment. We find most of the country-specific Web sites appear to follow S-shaped growth patterns (q is greater than p in 29 of the 36 diffusion models). We also find that the growth patterns MDS coefficients are significantly correlated with a combination of country-level physical infrastructure and institutional environment differences and both country-level and regional-level consumer (not work) cultural differences. In greater detail, it appears that the external p coefficients (aka advertising) in the diffusion models influence is, on average, lower for website growth in countries where there is lower physical infrastructure and institutional environment while the internal q coefficients (aka word of mouth) in the diffusion models influence is lower for website growth in countries where there are lower cultural levels of conservatism, affective autonomy, mastery, egalitarian commitment and/or higher levels of harmony.