Two new versions of the Google Analytics Management API have been released into public beta. There's also advice to developers about what to do about it.

Both new versions migrate the Management API from the existing Google Data Protocol to Google's new discovery-based API infrastructure.

The difference between them is that version 3.0 is new, has more features and is the version that will continue to be developed. On the other hand, version 2.4 has seen only minor changes but is backwards compatible with the "legacy version" version 2.3 which is now being deprecated and will only work for a further 2 months after which all v2.3 requests will return a v2.4 response.

The features that both new versions have in common are:

• A faster response over version 2.3
• An improved quota policy
• Integration with the Google APIs console to manage API access and request more quota

Beyond this users of version 2.4 benefit from continued support for existing authorization mechanisms although OAuth 2.0 is now supported but it only supports XML response and the Google Data JavaScript client library will not work with it - and the main deterrent is, of course, no further development

All future development will be done to version 3.0 and the advantages it already offers are:

• Event goals are fully represented.
• An internal web property id can be used to link into the Google Analytics user interface.
• Profile configurations for the default page and site search query parameters
• The API response is more compact using JSON
• New Google API client libraries, which support many more languages
• Support for the Google Discovery API

Google advises developers who are already using the Management API to migrate to version 3 unless they also use the Account Feed in the Data Export API. This is because a similar upgrade is planned for the Data Export API Data Feed - i.e. release two new versions of its API and deprecate version 2.3. At that time it will completely deprecate the Data Export API Account Feed. If you are still using this you can probably wait to do a full migration until all relevant APIs are on version 3.0.

More information:

Google Analytics blog

Further Reading:

Google dumps API (links to Discovery Service)

New Google Analytics API

Teach Yourself Google Analytics (book review)