# Pattern-Based and Visual Analytics for Visitor Analysis on Websites
## 4 Visual Model
### Visits View  
Page and visit reports are common features found in any web analytics platform, often, those reports are provided as tables or line plots (as shown in Figure 1). However, by using a different visualization, we can combine those reports into a single one. Our proposed visualization (Figure 4) displays information about both: the pages in the site and the visitors to these pages. The design is based on several concentric circles, formed by three different type of nodes, which connect to each other according to visit and page relationships. We start by describing the three types of nodes:  
**Visit nodes** Visit nodes form the outermost concentric semi-circle, these nodes are represented as circles with a country flag image. Each node represents a visit to the website. The flag indicates from which country the visit came. **Page nodes** Page nodes form several concentric semi-circles, these are the blue circles. Each node represents a unique web page of the website. **Objective nodes** Objective nodes are pictured as stars. These nodes are web pages that are considered goals of the business, for example: sign-up pages, landing pages, checkout pages, among others. They are distributed along with the page nodes. As we can see, nodes are arranged in two groups. The first group contains all the visit nodes and is distributed in the outermost semi-circle. The second group contains all the page and objective  
Figure 4: Visits View. Blue nodes represent web pages; stars are objective pages; nodes with country flags are visits of users from that country. Page views was used as metric and inverse _visit duration_ for the edge width. Thin connections represent longer visit duration; thicker otherwise. nodes and it distributed in several semi-circles. The nodes are ordered within the semicircles. Next, we explain how this ordering was defined, according to visit and page characteristics, and the advantages of this design. Visit nodes are grouped according to the country of origin. This allows to identify the countries that have more visits, as large groups of nodes with the same flag are easy to spot. An alternative ordering is to sort the nodes according to the visit duration, in this case, the user can look at the nodes at the far right (or left) to observe which visits were the longest (or shortest) and if they had any similarities in their countries of origin. We kept the ordering according to the country of origin due to two reasons: (1) it was preferred by our users, and (2) the visit duration is reflected in the connection between the nodes, as will be explained later in this section. Page and objective nodes are distributed in \(k\) semicircles, also called levels. Each level is ordered from the center to the outermost level in ascending order. Once the parameter \(k\) is established, the elements are distributed into the \(k\) levels in the following way: \(k\) segments of size \(\frac{max(metric)}{k}\) are selected, starting from \(min(metric)\). Then, we sort all the nodes into the respective level, ordered in ascendant from left to right. The index page, or home page of the website, is excluded from these computations because its position is fixed into the center of the view. A metric must be selected to designate the order of the nodes. The selection of this metric will determine the sort of information that will be quickly grasped just by looking at the position of the nodes. After continuous iterations with the final users of our tools, the selected metric is page views. Thus, pages with fewer page views are positioned at the leftmost side and increasingly positioned to the right. Pages on the first level (shortest radius) are the ones with fewer page views, whereas pages on the \(k^{st}\) level have the highest page views. This allows the marketing team to quickly identify the most visited pages, and see if their starred pages are truly visited more. Additionally, in the center of the node, the metric is displayed. The selection of \(k\) can reflect a certain _Key Performance Indicator (KPI)_.