Click behavior and link prioritization : multiple demand theory application for web improvement

A common problem encountered in Web improvement is how to arrange the homepage links of a Website. This study analyses Web information search behavior, and applies the multiple demand theory to propose two models to help a visitor allocate time for multiple links. The process of searching is viewed as a formal choice problem in which the visitor attempts to choose from multiple Web links to maximize the total utility. The proposed models are calibrated to clickstream data collected from an educational institute over a seven-and-a-half month period. Based on the best fit model, a metric, utility loss, is constructed to measure the performance of each link and arrange them accordingly. Empirical results show that the proposed metric is highly efficient for prioritizing the links on a homepage and the methodology can also be used to study the feasibility of introducing a new function in a Website.