Have you logged into your Google Analytics account this week? On Wednesday, Google transitioned all users to the new version of the Google Analytics interface, and whether you wanted to change or not, next time you log into your account, things will look different to you.Google Analytics is the most popular free web analytics tool, and content publishers rely on it to tell them where traffic is coming from, what content is performing well, and where improvements can be made. The new Google Analytics, which was released a year ago, brings a lot more data to users. It's also a lot faster!Google offers a special help page that you can use to walk through the new Google Analytics interface. In a nutshell, here are some of the new features:

• Timing: The Real-Time feature shows you what's happening on your site in real-time -- as it happens. Hosting a webinar? Log into your Google Analytics account and see how the event affects traffic and engagement to your content.
• Sources: Use the Multi-Channel Funnels feature to track traffic across the entire path (not just the last click) of all of your marketing channels over a 30-day period. It's hyped as a great tool to identify where to invest marketing dollars.
• Social: The new Social Reports feature will be particularly helpful to online publishers because it enables you to track how your social media marketing efforts affect traffic to and engagement with your content.
• Mobile: Use Mobile Reports to track the activities of people who visit your content via mobile devices. This feature also integrates with Google AdWords mobile campaigns, so you can track your paid advertising performance and conversions as well.
• Testing: If you liked A/B split testing, then you'll like the new Content Experiments feature which allows you to show different versions of a content page to different visitors and track the performance of each to identify the most effective version.

These new features add a lot to Google Analytics. They also give content publishers many ways to analyze content performance and find the most effective tactics and strategies to follow in order to boost traffic and engagement in both the short-term and long-term. Which feature are you most excited about?Image: Google Analytics