Google continues its host of  updates to its Analytics product by unveiling helpful new features.  Google focused it’s new features on enterprise level clients.

Google’s intent was to add more flexibility into the reporting so that users have the ability to see data which ever they want.  Below is a summary of updates:

They are (with more details below): Advanced Segmentation, Custom Reports, a data export API (private beta), integrated reporting for AdSense publishers (private beta), multi-dimensional data visualizations called “Motion Charts,” and an updated user and administrative interface.

These are features that experts and enterprise-level customers demand, and they will be available and easy to use in your Google Analytics reports. Please see below for details on each new feature and the release schedule letting you know when you can expect to have access to them. Here is a screenshot showing you where in your reports you can find a few of the new features, with more screenshots, help center links, and video demos (also at this YouTube playlist) below.

Features being added to all accounts in the coming weeks:

Advanced Segmentation enables you to isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic. It is true on-the-fly segmentation of visits so that you can create powerful filters with a few mouse-clicks. Select from predefined custom segments such as “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions” or create new custom segments with a flexible, easy-to-use segment builder. Then, you can apply one or more of these segments to current or historical data, and even compare segment performance side by side in reports.

Custom Reports are reports you create, save, and edit to give you a specific view of your data. You can choose the information and metrics you want to see, organized in the way you want to see it, by using a drag and drop interface to populate an Analytics report. You can also create tabs if you want to see related data – similar to a “Goal Conversions” tab – in effect creating multiple levels of sub-reports.

Once created, each custom report is available for as long as you want it. Take a look at this quick start guide to Custom Reports and to see a demo, play this video:

Motion Charts add sophisticated multi-dimensional analysis to most Analytics reports. Select metrics for the x-axis, y-axis, bubble size, and bubble color and view how they interact over time.

By comparing metrics visually over time you can expose data relationships that would be difficult to see in traditional reports. Motion Charts will be available through a new “Visualize” button at the top of reports.

Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

It appear that Google is testing ad placements but not geo or behaviroral  not targeting. They may also be examining the quality and nature of data that can be retrieved from an ad like this on a SERP.

The downside in moving forward with this for Google is twofold. Firstly, the non-intrusive clean interface and results are a big part of the Google experience for searchers.

Google is currently sitting on an enviably profitable search pie but as their share of the search market edges around the 70% mark they may be looking at places to wring more bucks out and continue their stellar growth. YouTube has been the obvious place for them to monetize but they know search the best and have been the most successful at finding dollars there. There’s an awful lot of room on those SERPs – filling some of it with lots of money…er…advertising must be very tempting even as it puts one of their strengths in jeopardy.

There has been much talk this week over Google’s official blog post regarding URL rewriting. Some think it’s a game changer, and some don’t. Essentially, Google recommends that you shouldn’t attempt to make dynamic URLs look static because A. Google can crawl those URLs anyway, B. some of the information passed in those URLs can help Google understand the content better and C. apparently, people screw up URL rewriting and then Google doesn’t see any of the information (a symptom of which I would believe yields much greater problems than Google not seeing your content-namely that your site wouldn’t be functioning).

URLs wear serve many different purposes. They are a branding tool (for better or worse), they are instructions for how a page should be rendered, they give people something to bookmark and the list goes on. When one ‘rewrites’ a URL, they may be doing so for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is to shorten them and make them easier to read (and thus, more likely to be clicked on, remembered from a print ad and so on). We KNOW Google recognizes words in URLs, and there are even operators to search for them there.

Even if the words in a URL aren’t factored into how a page is assigned a rank for a given search result, we certainly can draw attention to a URL if it has a word in it that matches a query. One would think from the SEO perspective, that we are leaving money on the table if we aren’t capitalizing on that opportunity.

This story was originally reported by TechCrunch.

Google seems to be bucket testing a feature that allows users to specify how detailed the summary blurbs in their search results will be. In an ongoing discussion here, one user comments that the three available options are Small (which omits a summary entirely), Medium (the current default length), and Long (which is around four times longer than normal). The changes affect more than just aesthetics – the Long setting apparently consists of both the standard meta summary as well as text pulled from the page itself, which could help users weed out sites with nice descriptions but little actual content.

Because search is such an integral part of its business, Google has to be careful whenever it thinks about implementing a new search-related feature. The company regularly tests out unannounced new features across a small percentage of its users to see if they are worth implementing on a wider scale (this is called bucket testing).