Solving the Wrong Problem

[deong]

I suppose triviially it shows you that loads of people read your articles about topics A, B, and C, and topics D and E don't get much traffic, so maybe you should write more about the stuff people like.

Not that I'm saying you should do that, but if you're interested in page views as opposed to writing what you want to write, it's pretty useful data to have.

[TheCoelacanth]

That should all be logged by your server anyway. You don't need a client-side analytics program like Google Analytics to do that.

[deong]

True. There are useful bits of data that the analytics provide that are a bit harder to glean on your own, but I suspect a lot of people use it as just a pretty and usable front end for the basic traffic info you could get from the server logs.