Just a few days ago, Google announced that there are som upcoming changes to the referring URL from google.com. Up until now the referring URL have looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search, förutsatt att besöket kom via ett klick på Googles förstasida.

From now on, starting with only a small percentage, the new referring URLs will look like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw.

Without any official comments on what the new parameters are, we can only speculate and hope that ‘cd’ will mean ranking. This would make my life so much easier, and for Google it has to mean a lot less searches made just to check rankings.

So to see if the cd parameter actually contains ranking information, earlier today I set up some filters, both to test if the new referring URLs are in use already, and to see what the cd parameter would hold. And I was more than a little stunned to see that the urls are in use already, especially since the test was performed on a site only getting traffic from Google Sweden, google.se.
I added 4 filters in total:

I added them to a new profile of an existing account, not to mess up any existing data. The first filter makes sure to exclude everything but the traffic from Google:

The second filter fetches the ‘cd’ parameter and stores it in ‘custom field 1′:

The third filter fetches the keyword from the referring url and stores it into ‘custiom field 2′:

The fourth, and last filter, puts the values stored in the custom fields into the”User defined” field, so that the information will be visible in the reports from within Google Analytics:

The results came after just a few hours, and I have deliberatly covered the actual keywords from the screen below:

I have double checked the rankings and they seem to be right. There are only some small differences.

If this is correct I guess we can expect to see native reports in Google Analytics for these numbers in the future.