Click frauds and invalid clicks have common characteristics in which clicks are categorized as unintentional, automated, and duplicate clicks that do not result in conversions. The invalid clicks are clicks that are determined to be fraud from Google's eye and are deducted from the advertiser's credit.

Doing business online doesn't necessarily mean selling products online, but also includes lead generation which leads to sales. Companies that sell mortgages, insurances, and other non-tangible products sell through offline funnels and those offline conversions must be tracked to improve marketing channels. Some offline conversions include tracking phone calls, leads that led to sales, and offline quotes generated from online leads.

With growing trend in consumer privacy concerns and exponential growth in data breaches, the state of California has created the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018, and fully in effect on January 1, 2020. CCPA gives consumers more control over how businesses collect and use their personal information, and gives them the right to know, opt-out, delete, and non-discriminated for exercising their privacy rights.

GDPR is a European privacy and security law that requires any organization that handles personally identifiable data of EU citizens to comply with its regulations. European Union mandated all organizations to comply with GDPR beginning on May 25, 2018. The GDPR imposes hefty fines for those who violate its privacy and security standards. With more and more personal data stored in the cloud, the EU is signaling the world that personal data must be treated private and stored securely. The GDPR is not only applicable to large corporations but also abides by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Whether you're an advertiser or publisher, click fraud is a concern for everyone. From an advertiser's point of view, click fraud will cause them to pay for traffic that is not intended. For publishers, click fraud may seem to increase their earnings initially but it may hurt their SEO, may invalidate their earnings at a later time, and also may potentially lose their publisher account. Ad networks such as Google have created measures to fight against click frauds and implemented various ways to detect and filter fraudulent clicks from costing advertisers.

In the traditional method of learning how consumers reach a business, salespeople used to ask "How did you find us?" question. This is a rudimentary way of finding out the source of a phone call, and the collection of each calls to generate a detailed report is hard to come by if there are a large number of sales reps receiving calls.

Development of heat maps dated back to the 19th century to provide a graphical representation of complex data so that it is easier for humans to analyze at-a-glance. Back then, a gray-scale shading was used to depict data patterns and the darker color was used to indicated dense values while lighter color was used to depict lesser values. A few applications of heat maps include depicting weather reports, real estate market data, and financial market analysis. The beauty of using heat maps is that you don't have to read a table of data in rows and columns to understand complex data, but rather view a simple colored map to grasp the big picture of data representation.

An email is the easiest way for scammers to mass distribute fraudulent messages to people, and it takes very minimal effort on their part. Email service providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! do their due diligence and filter all suspicious emails but scammers are finding new ways to bypass such filters. As an Internet user, it is our responsibility to identify and avoid them.

Google introduced the term, passage indexing, in October 2020 to rank "passages" to help users find answers to specific questions easily. The term is now renamed to passage ranking, and it is fully live in the United States as of 2021-02-10.

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