Your blog depends upon traffic for its success.
You need to monitor the traffic, to watch for problems. You use a visitor meter, to monitor the traffic numbers, and objectively watch for problems.
Most visitor logs and meters give you a bare minimum of diagnostic information - what pages / posts were read, what URLs were they read from, and similar demographic information about your visitors.
If you want to proactively watch for problems, that can cause your visitor meters to show changes, you use the diagnostic tools in Webmaster Tools / Search Console.
Use the tools, before problems are seen / questions are asked.
To better understand the reports provided by Webmaster Tools / Search Console, you will get more out of them if you use them before you have questions.
Observe normal displays, before you make changes.
Spend some time now, examining the various tools, now. Observe what's normal, before you make changes.
A visitor meter shows you what is happening, as your visitors see your blog. Many of your visitors find your blog using the search engines - Google Search, and other Internet services are essential, to getting you new readers.
Google Webmaster Tools / Search Console shows you what is happening, as the search engines see your blog - and helps you identify problems while they can be corrected.
You need to monitor the traffic, to watch for problems. You use a visitor meter, to monitor the traffic numbers, and objectively watch for problems.
Most visitor logs and meters give you a bare minimum of diagnostic information - what pages / posts were read, what URLs were they read from, and similar demographic information about your visitors.
If you want to proactively watch for problems, that can cause your visitor meters to show changes, you use the diagnostic tools in Webmaster Tools / Search Console.
Use the tools, before problems are seen / questions are asked.
To better understand the reports provided by Webmaster Tools / Search Console, you will get more out of them if you use them before you have questions.
Observe normal displays, before you make changes.
Spend some time now, examining the various tools, now. Observe what's normal, before you make changes.
A visitor meter shows you what is happening, as your visitors see your blog. Many of your visitors find your blog using the search engines - Google Search, and other Internet services are essential, to getting you new readers.
Google Webmaster Tools / Search Console shows you what is happening, as the search engines see your blog - and helps you identify problems while they can be corrected.
Comments
From what I can tell, Google has blocked about half of my posts from showing up with the use of Robots.txt that I have no control over, because I don't use an independent provider.
Keeping track of my daily numbers going up and down doesn't help me if I can't get the back-end properly working.
Sigh, I may end up having to pay someone to help me out on the SEO end of things to figure out what I'm doing wrong, though I prefer to do it myself and save the money and garner some self-satisfaction in the process.
Both in BHF: Something Is Broken, and this blog, will provide answers to the never ending question about "robots.txt" and blocked searches.