Platform analytics show you impressions first because impressions are the biggest number. They are also the least useful one.
What impressions do not tell you
Impressions measure how many feeds the post appeared in, which is mostly a function of when you posted and what the algorithm was doing that hour. A post with ten thousand impressions and four comments performed worse than one with eight hundred and twelve comments, and the dashboard will show the first one as the winner.
Treat it as a denominator, not a result.
The four that matter
Profile visits. Someone read the post and wanted to know who wrote it. That is the closest thing to intent that any platform reports, and it is the number that predicts everything downstream.
Comments with substance. Not "great post". A comment that adds an experience, disagrees, or asks a specific question means someone engaged with the idea. Three of these is a better week than a thousand extra impressions.
Saves and shares. Someone thought it would be useful later, or useful to someone else. Both are strong signals and both are rare.
Traffic to your site, by post. The only number that connects writing to anything downstream. If you post links, tag them so you can tell which post sent what.
The one that matters most and is hardest to see
Direct messages. Someone reading a post, forming an impression of you, and deciding to start a conversation.
No dashboard shows this as a metric. It is also, for most developers building something, where every actually consequential outcome has come from: the job, the collaborator, the first customer.
The timeframe problem
Single post numbers are mostly noise. Variance between two equally good posts is large, driven by timing and luck.
Look at rolling four week windows instead. Is profile traffic trending up? Are comments getting more substantive? Are the same names appearing?
Month over month is signal. Post over post is not, and reacting to individual post performance is how people end up chasing whatever got lucky once.
What to do with the information
Very little, honestly.
The main use is negative: if nothing moves over three months, something is wrong with what you are writing about, not with your posting time or your hashtags.
The temptation is to optimise toward the numbers, and the reliable result of that is worse content, because what maximises engagement short term is hooks and provocation rather than useful specifics.
The version that works is slower. Write about real things, consistently, for long enough that the people who care about that subject find you. The numbers confirm it happened. They do not cause it.