Abstract:

With the rapid development of Web technologies, the competition among electronic business area has become more and more serious. It has been an important problem for electronic business companies to acquire competitive intelligence in the Web era and further to enhance their competition powers. Aiming at solving this problem, in this paper we focus on the competitor analysis issue for electronic business area, which is based on the analysis on Web user logs. Web user logs record users’ behaviors in the Web. Web user logs are much different from traditional Web server logs, in which only the users’ behaviors in a specific server are captured. In this paper, we use statistical and mining approaches to obtain the competitive information hidden in Web user logs, and then use them to evaluate the competition situations among different electronic business companies. Besides, the reasons as well as some possible counter measures are also discussed. Compared with previous works in this area, the main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we present a new viewpoint for competitor analysis. Second, we propose a Web-user-log-based analyzing model to evaluate the competition situations among electronic business companies. And finally, we conduct experimental studies for 11 electronic business companies on a real data set. The research of this paper is expected to bring some new referential values to the acquirement of competitive intelligence in the Web.

Key words: Web user logs, Electronic business, Competitor, Competitive intelligence