Anyone who spends time managing a business becomes intimately familiar with Murphy's Law:

If anything can go wrong, it will.

In 1949, Captain Edward A. Murphy formulated this now-famous "law" at Edwards Air Force Base while working on a series of experiments to determine how much sudden deceleration a human body might withstand during an airplane crash. One day, while cursing a technician for improperly wiring a transducer, Murphy said, "If there's a way to do it wrong, he'll find it." The defense contractor company, who kept a list of laws for the project, added it to the list as Murphy's Law—and later attributed the firm's outstanding safety record to its consistent application.

If we were to extrapolate Murphy's Law and apply it to your website, it might go something like this:

If anything can go wrong along the visitor's path from clicking your ad to traversing your website to purchasing or opting-in, it will.

In short, if there's a way to do it wrong, they'll find it! ...for instance:

• Search engines will send you the wrong prospects.
  
  
• Prospects will find unexpected reasons to leave your site or otherwise fail to take action and do business with you.
  
  
• Credit card payment processors will crash at the most inopportune times.

The list of variables (i.e., whatever can go wrong) is long. Stuff happens. Yet, the road to profits runs along the avenue of understanding those variables that can upset your online profit model. Pinpointing such upsets—quickly—is the only way you can consistently respond in time with adjustments to fend off disaster while you keep the profits steady.

So, what's your first line of defense against nasty surprises ruining your ecommerce day (week, month, or year)? ...answer: web analytics!

What is Web Analytics?