Urchin, Google and You

There has been some talk lately about Google's purchase of Urchin, a low-cost web analytics company. Word on the street is that Google will be using the service to help its many advertisers better track their ROI. From the press release at Urchin:

"Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective. "

This seems like a fairly natural move since Google's biggest competitor, Overture, Yahoo's PPC advertising solution, already provides something similar.

I am going to further propose the idea that this might help the situation in the click-fraud department, currently the greatest plague to PPC advertising. Detailed client side tracking might offer more chances to catch blatant abuse. That would be nice.