According to PC World, Google plans to roll out IP blacklisting services to advertisers in March.  In an attempt to address growing concerns over click fraud, Google has been working on ways to not only increase transparency for advertisers, but also help advertisers combat suspicious click activity.  Google said yesterday that "invalid clicks" accounted for less than 10% of all clicks in the Google network.  But for a network the size of Google's, that's still a lot of clicks.

This is huge news for advertisers.  We've been begging for tools like this for what seems like eons!  A couple of days ago it was added transparency.  This is another one of those "giant leap" moves.  If Google, and the other PPCs, can turn the click fraud tide around, it would be huge for the entire PPC advertising platform.  Not just Google would benefit.  Everyone would.

I like the way Google is implementing this, too.  It puts the burden of responsibility directly on the advertisers… not on Google.  If you don't want someone clicking on your ads, it's no longer going to be an issue to take up with Google.  Simply ban them from clicking your ads again.  But it also means that a lot of advertisers won't do a single thing with it (which is good for Google).  So in a way, they're giving everyone what they want.

A few more tools I wouldn't mind seeing from PPC advertising systems are:

• Lists of sites that ads show up on for the search network.  So far, the announced improvements in this area are for the content network only.
• Better IP filtering.  If I say I don't want my ads displayed to people from country X, and 10% of my traffic is still coming from country X, there's a problem somewhere.
• Better matching and customization tools.

- Matt