Starting next week, Google will provide its AdWords customers with information on how many times it believes their ads have been fradulently clicked. With the company fighting some of its advertisers– namely, Lane’s Gifts– in court over this issue, the new feature could help it in its defense.

Google says that it decided to offer the service to give advertisers a real-time report of how many clicks the company has filtered out as frauduluent. According to some advocacy groups, as much as 15% of all clicks may be invalid. Details of this new feature were reported by MarketWatch and also covered on BetaNews and Adotas.

The new section deplays both the number and percentage of invalid clicks. Of course, Google doesn’t charge advertisers for clicks it deems invalid. According to Outsell, click fraud cost the industry more than $800 million last year. With fraud stats, Google will be more transparent about how they handle the problem. Now advertisers can see Google’s stats, instead of looking to a third-party researcher. The click fraud data displayed by AdWords goes back to the beginning of 2006.

Although there is more transparency, Google is still limiting the amount of click fraud info shown to the public in order to prevent click frauders from reverse-engineering the detection algorithms. I think this is a step forward for the company, and if they’re being honest, why not publish the stats? They’ve nothing to hide– as long as they think very carefully to make sure the data can’t be exploited.