Analyzing Web behavior in indoor retail spaces

We analyze 18‐ million rows of Wi‐Fi access logs collected over a 1‐year period from over 120,000 anonymized users at an inner city shopping mall. The anonymized data set gathered from an opt‐in system provides users' approximate physical location as well as web browsing and some search history. Such data provide a unique opportunity to analyze the interaction between people's behavior in physical retail spaces and their web behavior, serving as a proxy to their information needs. We found that (a) there is a weekly periodicity in users' visits to the mall; (b) people tend to visit similar mall locations and web content during their repeated visits to the mall; (c) around 60% of registered Wi‐Fi users actively browse the web, and around 10% of them use Wi‐Fi for accessing web search engines; (d) people are likely to spend a relatively constant amount of time browsing the web while the duration of their visit may vary; (e) the physical spatial context has a small, but significant, influence on the web content that indoor users browse; and (f) accompanying users tend to access resources from the same web domains.

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