Patent ID: 7801950

Claim:
A method for monitoring visits by visitors to a web site, comprising the following computer-implemented steps: a. embedding in a web page to be monitored code to request a thumbnail map from a system server when the page is visited and loaded into a browser, said thumbnail map providing both a user-activateable link to a page within the system server and an element of a mechanism for counting visits by the visitors who are currently visiting the site; b. at the system server, returning the requested thumbnail map to the web browser, and recording the IP address from which the thumbnail map was requested; c. for each recorded IP address, determining a corresponding geographical location from which the web page was visited; d. grouping the visits into clusters according to their geographical locations, the visits being grouped by a clustering process that includes both agglomerative hierarchical clustering and also pre-grouping of visits from similar locations, wherein the agglomerative hierarchical clustering is speeded up by the pre-grouping of visits from locations that are deemed similar by rounding off their coordinates and also by similarity of postal codes, and normalizing each cluster via reduction by a common factor; and e. periodically creating and storing a detailed map and a thumbnail map, each map being an image that is a representation of the geographical distribution of the clusters of recorded IP addresses, each cluster being represented on the map by a mark that indicates the location of the cluster and varies in dependence on the total number of visits in that cluster, wherein the detailed map has a larger scale and contains more detail than the thumbnail map, wherein, upon activation of the user-activateable link provided by the thumbnail map, the linked page within the system server that includes the detailed map is retrieved and displayed by the browser.