Last week, Bing announced its Phoenix update that includes an armada of new and updated utilities for Bing Webmaster Tools that should give webmasters whole new dimensions of search data to tinker around with and evaluate. While the Bing Team promised to elaborate on each of the tools in the near future, Bing Webmaster Tool’s guru Duane Forrester stopped by SEOmoz to discuss and demo some of the new tools on Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday.

The pair talk through several of the features with Bing Webmaster Tools as Forrester explains what the different aspects of traffic reports mean, how keywords are evaluated from an advertising perspective, etc. It’s the most comprehensive explanation and tutorial you’re likely to get on Bing Webmaster Tools to date; even if you’re a novice with SEO and traffic analysis, you should still be able to follow along with the discussion.

Even though you should watch the video if you’re looking to get a better grasp of Bing Webmaster Tools, SEOmoz also provided the transcript if you want to skip around. More, Forrester has been hanging around in the page’s comments section the past couple of days to answer some users’ questions which, if you’ve got some lingering confusion or lack of clarity, you should check out to see if your answer is awaiting you somewhere in the thread.

Webmasters could really go delightfully tumbling down an SEO-hole with all of the rich data that Bing’s new Webmaster Tools inventory has to offer, and it certainly makes a formidable challenge to Google Analytics. If you’ve taken both of those services for a test drive or two, which do you find works best for your site? Did Bing just put Google on notice with this Phoenix update? Let us know below in the comments.

[Via Search Engine Journal.]