The distinction from analytics is worth understanding because businesses routinely confuse them. Analytics tells you what people did after they arrived on your site. Search Console tells you what happened before, in the search results, including the queries where you appeared and nobody clicked. That second category is invisible everywhere else and is frequently the most useful information available, because it shows you what people are actually searching when they find you, which is usually not what you assumed.
The report that produces the most immediate value is the one showing queries with high impressions and low clicks. Those are searches where you appeared and were not chosen, which usually means your title and description did not match what the searcher wanted, and rewriting them is a change you can make in ten minutes with no technical work. It is the closest thing to free improvement available on a website.
The coverage or pages report is the other one to check, because it tells you which pages are actually in the index. A page that is not indexed cannot appear for anything, and the reasons are frequently mundane: a stray instruction telling search engines to ignore it, a redirect chain, or a page the crawler simply has not reached. Businesses puzzled about why a page never ranks are often looking at a page that was never included.
Set it up alongside your sitemap, submit that sitemap through the interface, and then check it monthly rather than daily. The data updates with a delay and daily fluctuation on a small site is mostly noise. What you are looking for is a trend over months and any new error that appears, and both are visible in a ten minute review.
Verify ownership through your domain rather than through a single page if you can, because domain verification covers every version of your address at once, including the secure and insecure forms and any subdomains. Verifying one specific version is the common shortcut and it produces a partial picture, with data split across properties or missing entirely for the version people actually reach.