Outrider views click fraud as a broader problem that includes what it calls "unwanted clicks" that aren't maliciously generated but that nonetheless offer advertisers little or no value. For example, a company that only sells in the U.S. gets no benefit from clicks on its ads by people who live abroad, he said.

Gaining this insight, backed up by hard data from Click Forensics, lets Outrider further optimize its clients' campaigns, Cowan said. And the more confident a company is about the effectiveness of its search ad campaigns, the more it will invest in them, which is good for all parties involved, Google included.

"By buying into this, Google is simply accepting the fact that it's good to have a third party review [its ad campaigns] so that someone not connected to their company is also saying 'yes, it's working,'" Cowan said.

Click Forensics' Pellman said his company doesn't need cooperation from Google or any other search ad providers in order to collect their data and track clicks on clients' campaigns.

However, the FACTr service, which focuses on generating automated reports based on the collected data right from the Click Forensics interface, does benefit from cooperation from the search ad providers.

"Customers can now [electronically] submit a detailed evidence report in the format in which Google wants it, which is different from the format in which Yahoo wants it. And Google will accept that report and respond back," Pellman said.

In addition to Google, Click Forensics also announced on Thursday that Miva and LookSmart are now also supporting FACTr.

Click Forensics, which reports on click-fraud incidence every quarter, recently said that the overall industry average for click fraud was 16.2 percent in the second quarter of this year. "We continue to see click fraud as a big challenge for advertisers," Pellman said.

Fraudsters are getting more sophisticated and trying to make their scams harder to detect and track, lately resorting to using botnets to perpetrate click fraud, he said. "Click fraud is a big, consistent problem and it's not going away," Pellman said.