DyadStats : Advanced visitor reporting and conversion analysis

In the beginning there were log-files...

There still are log-files and lots of them. Every time you request a page on a website the server it's on will make a note of which page you've requested and every element that makes up the page: images, external JavaScript and CSS files, address bar icons, and so on. Unless of course you've recently visited the page and your browser has stored a copy on your computer to save it from having to ask for the page again. Confusing? Indeed. Not only do log files not actually log everything a user does, making sense of the stuff that is logged can be rather less than straightforward.

You could of course spend a lot of time and effort regurgitating log-files looking for magic formulae to help tell you how your website might be performing. Or, you could build some sort of recording mechanism directly into you website application, and by issuing visitors with unique reference numbers and using cookies to store them you can build up histories so that if someone does something important like submit an enquiry form on their 5th visit you should be able to see how they found your website on their 1st.

In short, cookie-based tracking can give you meaningful summaries of visitor numbers and conversion rates without having to go anywhere near a log-file.

What is DyadStats?

I started building cookie-based tracking into websites when I first started building websites with PHP and I was one of the first people in the world to issue unique reference numbers to visitors on their first page request without using an embedded image or JavaScript.

Every website I look after has tracking built-in, and none of my clients has ever asked for log files or reports based on them. The log-files are still there though and rather than just let them sit there I thought I might get them to earn their keep by reading them into a database and then comparing the data from the logs against the data produced by the cookie-based tracking.

Dyad is the Pythagorean principle of 'twoness' and DyadStats is the name I've chosen for what seems to be a unique system.

The DyadStats system is being installed on this website soon and any reports will be made public.