Scaling for E-Business

2.8. The Customer Visit Model (CVM)

As we discussed in the previous sections, one can obtain the average number of visits to each state of the CBMG from the transition matrix P associated to the CBMG. An alternate and less detailed representation of a session would entail representing a session as a vector of visit ratios to each state of the CBMG. The visit ratio is the number of visits to a state during a session.

Table 2.4 shows an example of three sessions described by the number of visits to each state. Note that states Entry and Exit are not represented in the CVM since the number of visits to these states is always one. Session 1 in the table represents a session of a customer who browsed through the site, did a few searches, but did not ...