> And I disagree with another commenter here saying Analytics is just for vanity. That's not true — even for a personal blog analytics are useful to see which articles are still being visited and thus need to be kept up to date, or in case content is deprecated, the least you could do is to put up a warning.
Some examples: I maintained a Vim ChangeLog for a while (which is quite some work), and turned out no one was reading that, so ... why bother?
In another case, I wrote an article about "how to detect automatically generated emails" and I thought it wasn't actually that interesting and no one read it so considered archiving it, but turned out quite a few people end up there through Google searches etc. and I ended up updating it instead of archiving it, as it was clearly useful to people.
Three times I found out that a blog post of mine was on the HN frontpage, because my matomo was going bonkers. This might count as "vanity metrics", but it taught me, above all, how valuable "being here" is. It has a clear and undeniable "inkstain" effect: where other blogs, news outlets and so on follow HN. HN goes hand-in-hand with reddit, for my niche, though.
My wife as several e-commerce and our weekly "walking through the matomo screens over a glass of wine" has learned us that there are important niches. And what those niches are (vegan smartphone covers, Fairphone flip-cases, fairtrade and environmental-friendly mouthmasks).
Sure, you also need customer interviews and old-fashioned market-research, but your webapp and website is telling you a lot about your users.
And sure, often, you don't need any metrics. But just like Carpetsmoker above, I see a lot of value in metrics. Just don't fall in the trap to collect "you-never-know" metrics: that is privacy-invading, a liability and requires a scale beyond anything you really need. You don't need data-lake, distributed ETL processes and whatnot to find out that there are products in your webshop selling better than others because you are doing well on natural searches for that product.
Some examples: I maintained a Vim ChangeLog for a while (which is quite some work), and turned out no one was reading that, so ... why bother?
In another case, I wrote an article about "how to detect automatically generated emails" and I thought it wasn't actually that interesting and no one read it so considered archiving it, but turned out quite a few people end up there through Google searches etc. and I ended up updating it instead of archiving it, as it was clearly useful to people.