I use Fathom[1] for simple, privacy-conscious analytics on my blog. It is interesting to know which pages people are visiting and where they're visiting from. It's rewarding to see month-over-month increases in traffic, too--even if I don't get a lot of traffic. It's motivating to see that people are spending their own time to read what I've written.
Different people will use analytics for different purposes, and different metrics will matter to different people. For me, seeing people read multiple posts (when the number of page views is greater than the number of visitors) is the most rewarding metric. It's one thing to click through from Google. It's another to click through one article and want to read more.