Feedburner's just released a pretty significant upgrade to their service, including a new "Feed Stats Dashboard" and some much needed drill-down stats on individual posts. TechCrunch has the early scoop as well.

The best new feature for me is the feed item stats, so I'll start with that. Now you can see what percentage of your subscribers clicked on any one of your items. Also how many people actually looked at the post in their RSS Reader. Feedburner's Dick Costolo said they hope to spend a lot more time on this - what they call "reach" - based on how people react to it.

According to Dick other new features are:

- Uncommon uses. Feedburner tracks over 200k feeds and when a feed is referenced or clicked that Feedburner doesn't recognize as a "common reference", they highlight it in the dashboard and on the detailed uncommon uses page. You then have the option of "whitelisting" or "hiding" such references.

- Historical reach and subscription from the dashboard. You can now click back through the days on the dashboard chart to see reach and item popularity by day. This reminds me of Measure Map (recently bought by Google), except for feeds instead of web page views. I love those stats from Measure Map, so having them for feeds will be even better!

- Podcasters get better feed level download tracking. In addition to subscribers Feedburner now identifies the number of people that actually downloaded a particular podcast.

So all in all some excellent new functionality and I'm particularly pleased that I can finally analyze my individual RSS feed items (posts) much more thoroughly.