SYSTEM FOR ANALYZING AND VISUALIZING ACCESS STATISTICS FOR A WEB SITE

A method for monitoring and visualizing user access made to a web site is disclosed. The method comprises: embedding in a web page to be monitored code to request a thumbnail image from a site when the page is loaded into a browser. The embedded code also includes a user-activateable link to a page within the system server. At the system server, the requested thumbnail image is returned to the web browser, and the IP address from which the thumbnail was requested is recorded. For each recorded IP address, the server determines a corresponding geographical location. The server creates and stores an image that is a geographical representation of the geographical distribution of the recorded IP addresses, and a thumbnail representation of that image. Upon activation of the user-activateable link, the linked page within the system server that includes the image previously created is retrieved by the browser. The thumbnail image requested by the embedded code is the thumbnail image created in this step. A number of threshold, updating, clustering, storage and archiving routines are deployed to ensure large scalability.