Web Analytics with Fuzziness

Abstract

In the Internet economy and information society, it has become an essential task of electronic business to analyze, to monitor, and to optimize websites and Web offers. Therefore, this chapter addresses the issues of Web analytics, which is defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing website usage. After a short introduction, the second section defines Web analytics, describes benefits and problems of Web analytics, as well as different software architectures and products. Third, a controlling loop is proposed for Web content and Web user controlling in order to analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and to take website- and e-business-related actions. Fourth, different Web metrics and KPIs of information, transaction and communication are defined. Fifth, a fuzzy Web analytics approach is proposed, which makes it possible to classify Web metrics precisely into more than one class at the same time. Considering real Web data of the Web metrics page views and bounce rate, it is shown that fuzzy classification allows exact and flexible segmentation of Web pages or other objects and gradual rankings within fuzzy sets. In addition, the fuzzy logic approach enables Computing with Words (CWW), i.e. the perception-based, linguistic consideration of Web data and Web metrics instead of measurement-based, numerical ones. Web usage mining with inductive fuzzy classification and Web Analytics with Words (WAW) allows intuitive, human-oriented analyses, description, and reporting of Web metrics values in natural language.