Google this week continued to hone its effort to push its Google Analytics service into corporate IT shops by adding a slew of new features, including custom report generation, advanced segmentation and integration with Google AdSense .

The new features will let larger companies using Google Analytics ditch any third-party tools they are using for segmentation or custom reporting of data generated from Google Analytics, noted Brett Crosby, group manager for Google Analytics.

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"This is an enterprise class feature launch," he said. "[Users have] been spending a lot of time and money trying to squeeze out this information from a lot of other tools. We think this will solve the dueling tool problem within these organizations."

The free hosted Google Analytics service was launched three years ago to demand so great Google had to temporarily suspend taking on new users.

The integration with Google's AdSense advertising network lets users see which pages of their site are driving the most revenue from AdSense ads. Integrating AdSense and Google Analytics will allow users to determine what content people like, which referring sources are driving the most revenue and which geographies are driving the most revenue, Crosby added.

"There are a lot of sites that use AdSense to drive revenue, and that is their primary source of revenue," he noted. "They can see what their return on investment is."

The update also adds support for advanced segmentation, allowing users to isolate and analyze subsets of their Web traffic -- like visitors who came through an e-mail marketing campaign or those who can from a company buying keywords, Google said. "It allows you to basically zero in on any segment of traffic you want to look at," Crosby said.

Once a company creates a segment for analysis, the tool can be used to compare the past behavior of that subset to the rest of the traffic on the site, Crosby added.

"The idea is to create segments of customer so you can see that buyers behave really differently than my 'looky loo' customers," Crosby noted. "You can start to identify the differences in those sorts of traffic."

Another new feature in Google Analytics allows users to create custom reports using any metrics, Crosby added. This feature could also be used in conjunction with advanced segmentation so users can have more options on how to analyze data.

New advanced visualization capabilities, which provide motion charts of data -- bubble charts that can be animated to show trends over time -- can help users find aspects of data that might not otherwise be apparent, Crosby added.

Finally, Google unveiled a beta of a new Google Analytics API, which will allow developers to pull data out of the analytics service to build new applications. Crosby said that "renegade developers" have already written scripts or created other ways on their own to build new applications that use Google Analytics data. Examples, he said, include iPhone applications that display Google Analytics data on the iPhone, and a Flash-based desktop version of the analytics service.

"I think this is one of the most significant things we can do is allow people to pull data out of Google Analytics and build applications for it that we might never have dreamed of," Crosby noted. "We have a very large customer base, and a lot of these people are developers and want to do things with the data."

Google plans to roll out most of the new features to users over the next several weeks. Crosby noted that the integration with AdSense may take longer than a few weeks, and that the API is available by invitation only.

A year ago Google updated Google Analytics by adding internal search and event tracking capabilities. The latter feature allows Web site operators to more accurately measure how visitors are using interactive Web site elements like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), JavaScript, Flash movies, page gadgets and other multimedia tools, Crosby said.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Start to finish, the week was full of news related to the sorry state of the global economy, with Sun capping things off by announcing it will cut thousands of jobs. Casting a little hopeful light on yet another week of dismal news was optimism from IT professionals who say that, unlike with previous downturns, they aren't being ordered to make drastic cuts. In somewhat brighter news, AMD launched its Shanghai quad-core Opteron chip, Citrix is bringing its XenApps and XenDesktop software to the iPhone, and Microsoft has released an updated, less-restricted API for its Live Search.

1. Sun waves goodbye to 18 percent of workforce: Sun is cutting 5,000 to 6,000 jobs -- 15 percent to 18 percent of its workforce -- in an effort to save $700 million to $800 million in costs, the company said Friday, ending a week that was rife with dismal financial news for IT vendors. The company is also reorganizing its software division, with Executive Vice President of Software Rich Green deciding to take his leave from Sun.

[ Video: Catch up the on the week in tech news with the World Tech Update ]

2. Citrix developing XenApps and XenDesktop for the iPhone: Citirix has announced that by early 2009, its XenApps and XenDesktop software will be available for the iPhone, which means that iPhone users will be able to run virtualized versions of Microsoft software like the Office suite.

3. AMD launches 'Shanghai' quad-core Opteron and AMD bails out IT: AMD launched Shanghai, its latest quad-core Opteron processor, ahead of schedule and insisted that problems with its Barcelona chip earlier this year are behind the company. AMD lost market share and credibility after bugs were found in Barcelona's cache memory, causing mass shipments of the processor to be delayed. Although at least one analyst said that the current plight of the global economy means this is not the optimal time to launch a new processor, early reviews of Shanghai were good, with Infoworld's Tom Yager saying that IT could really use the boost brought by the launch.

4. 2008 Salary Survey: IT pay takes tiny leaps: Some 7,000 IT workers responded to Computerworld's annual salary survey -- if your pay hasn't changed and your bonus has been eliminated, you're not alone. Besides providing IT salary data, the survey package of stories includes a look at hot jobs to consider, as well as ways to plump up the old paycheck.

5. The 2009 IT career survival guide: These are trying economic times, and the IT sector is not exempted from the strain. As such, many IT workers are nervous -- and understandably so. With that in mind, InfoWorld offers this career survival guide to help you take control of your own destiny and survive the economic turmoil.

6. Microsoft releases new API for Live Search: Microsoft has released a new API, called Project Silkwood, for its Live Search. Project Silkwood supports a broad range of open Web protocols and technologies used to build Web sites, including RSS, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), REST (Representational State Transfer), and XML, and it also features a less stringent set of restictions on how the API can be used.

7. Web site collects ideas for Obama's CTO: U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said last year when he was campaigning that he would be the first president to appoint a CTO and assuming he sticks to that campaign pledge the first person in that new national role will start the job with a lot of advice. A Web site has been set up where people can offer their ideas and vote on what the CTO should work on. Created by Front Seat in Seattle, the site went up on Wednesday and by Thursday afternoon had already collected more than 8,300 votes on ideas.

8. LCD makers settle price-fixing charges, agree to fines: LG Display, Sharp, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes agreed to plead guilty and pay a total of $585 million in criminal fines for conspiring to fix LCD prices, the U.S. Department of Justice said. LG was nailed with $400 million of the fines -- the second-largest fine ever from the DOJ's Antitrust Division. The companies expressed regret over their actions and agreed to cooperate with an ongoing DOJ antitrust investigation.

9. Survey: Despite risks, employees still holiday shop at work: Although online holiday shopping from work computers poses risks to corporate networks, most employees will do some sort of such shopping in the coming weeks and most companies don't have any effective plan in place to stop them. Nor do they have any mechanism for educating employees about the risks. Such were the findings from ISACA, a global, nonprofit group of IT professionals. So-called Millennials, aged 18-24, will spend up to five work hours shopping on their work computers, and that group is the least concerned about exposing corporate networks to security risks, the survey found.

10. How 10 famous technology products got their names: Ever wonder how the BlackBerry got its name? iPod? Twitter? Various other iconic tech products? The answer to that question for 10 of most famous products or Web sites around today can be found at the link.