Testing online navigation recommendations in a web site

Abstract

An online navigation recommendation system provides the prospective web site visitor with a set of pages that could be of his/her interest. Because the recommendations are given during the user session in the web site, it could be very damaging for the overall business of the company owning the web site, if the recommendations are erroneous. In this paper, we introduce an a priori method to estimate the success of an online navigation recommendation. The methodology was tested in a recommendation system that works with the data generated in a real web site, which proved the effectiveness of our approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.