Exploratory Session Analysis in the Mobile Clickstream

Abstract

As a sub-day-scale behavior analysis, the length of sessions in multiple mobile Internet services was examined. Using mobile clickstreams with user identifiers, two analyses were performed: a preparatory study for timeout values in session identification in 2000 and a long-term observation of session lengths and clicks per session in 2001. The first study showed that 10 minutes is a suitable timeout value for the observed mobile web. The second produced inter-service comparisons and showed the effects of different mobile-Internet-specific factors. The limitations and challenges for mobile-clickstream-based session identification are also discussed.