Nowadays, navigational analytics (NVGA) in real-time is used extensively across e-commerce, social media and content-based marketing and video streaming applications, providing curated options to improve the user experience across platforms. As a result of this improved analytics at user-level, these applications are able to increase market reach and revenue manifold. NVGA also helps to improve application performance, the most important factor for retaining users from switching to a different application. A recent Adobe Consumer content survey shows that likelihood of user switching to another website or mobile application is 33% for young users & 48% for above 50 yrs., if access time is long.
ClickStream Analytics is an information retrieval use case for Mahout. Most of the e-commerce applications, social networking sites and several websites carry out lots of analysis using the ClickStream data. ClickStream data could be generated from any activity performed by the user over a web application. What could be the user activity over any website? For example, I am logging into Amazon, what are the activities I could perform? In a pattern, I may navigate through some pages; spend some time over certain pages and click on certain things. All these activities, including reaching that particular page or application, clicking, navigating from one page to another and spending time make a set of data. All these will be locked by a web application. This data is known as ClickStream Data. It has a high business value, specific to e-commerce applications and for those who want to understand their users’ behavior.
Challenges
Users and Applications, both follow legacy navigational paradigms such as HR Managers who frequently review leave request, would need to browse specific module, and traverse several menus to access the functionality; or buyers who would need to review current and previous orders before placing fresh order with supplier, resulting in increased clicks and resource usage.
Also, application performance degrades over time due to use of traditional technology, increase in user traffic and compliances, and less than optimal application page design and content, which affects the user experience. Such legacy application can be optimized using NVGA.
ClickStream Analytics
Using the ClickStream data adds a lot of value to businesses, through which they can bring many customers or visitors. It helps them understand whether the application is right, and the application experience of users is good or bad, based on the navigation patterns that people take. They can also predict which page you are most likely to visit next and can do Ad Targeting as well. With this, they can understand the needs of users and come up with better recommendations. Several other things are possible using the ClickStream Data.
The kind of data that is captured for ClickStream Analysis may include:
- Where was the visitor before reaching my website?
- What was the search term used if the visitor came from a search engine?
- Which webpage did the visitor first access on my website?
- What are the pages the visitor accessed on my website and in what sequence?
- How much time did the visitor spend on each page?
- When and where did the visitor click the “back” button on the web browser?
- What items did the visitor add to (or remove from) their shopping cart?
- From which page did the visitor exit my website?