And also just knowing some people read what you write is nice. There is nothing wrong with having some validation (as long as you don't obsess over it) and it's a basic human need.
This is just for a blog; for a product knowing "how many people actually use this?" is useful. I suspect that for some things the number is literally 0, but it can be hard to know for sure.
User interviews are great, but it's time-consuming to do well and especially for small teams this is not always doable. It's also hard to catch things that are useful for just a small fraction of your users. i.e. "it's useful for 5%" means you need to do a lot of user interviews (and hope they don't forget to mention it!)
Services like Plausible give you the bare minimum to understand what is viewed most. If you have a website that you want people to visit then it’s a pretty basic requirement that you’ll want to see what people are interested in.
When you start “personalising” the experience based on some tracking that’s when it becomes a problem.
not really
it should be what you are competent and proficient at
people will come because they like what you do, not because you do the things they like (sounds like the same thing, but it isn't)
there are many proxies to know what they like if you want to plan what to publish and when and for how long, website visits are one of the less interesting.
a lot of websites such as this one get a lot of visits that drive no revenue at all.
OTOH there are websites who receive a small amount of visits, but make revenues based on the amount of people subscribing to the content (the textbook example is OF, people there can get from a handful of subscriber what others earn from hundreds of thousands of views on YT or the like)
so basically monitoring your revenues works better than constantly optimizing for views, in the latter case you are optimizing for the wrong thing
I know a lot of people who sell online that do not use analytics at all, except for coarse grained ones like number of subscriptions/number of items sold/how many email they receive about something they published or messages from social platforms etc.
that's been true in my experience through almost 30 years of interacting and helping publishing creative content online and offline (books, records, etc)
This isn’t true for all channels. The current state of search requires you to adapt your content to what people are looking for. Social channels are as you’ve said.
It doesn’t matter how you want to slice it. Understanding how many people are coming to your website, from where and what they’re looking at is valuable.
I agree the “end metric” is whatever actually drives the revenue. But number of people coming to a website can help tune that.
you chose to send an email or to buy a product or a subscription, which is different from being tracked.
it's still a metric, but has an higher value.
it's people genuinely interested in what you offer.