With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish. You could look at your server logs, of course, but analytics is easier to set up and gives you higher quality data than something like AWStats. Since Google lets you opt out of sharing your data with them I don't see much argument against using it.
> With any website it's important to know how many visitors it is receiving. In the context of a blog knowing you're getting a lot of traffic can motivate you to publish more content and knowing more about your visitors can also feed into what sort of content you publish.
No, and trying to make your content more appealing based on analytics is often a great way to tend towards SEO optimized blogspam.
By filtering out bots and giving you the number of visits rather than just pageviews, and also giving you data on things like screen resolution and time on page that can only be retrieved in javascript.
Or you can have comments or some social platform for interacting with users, which is more rewarding, direct, and useful for future direction or content suggestions.
But also requires things like moderation, especially if your topic of choice is remotely controversial. It also gives you individual data points rather than an overall picture, skewing towards people with strong opinions.
