TaxConnections Offers Ten Lesson Plans important for anyone working online to know. These Lesson Plans bring valuable information to light people are generally unaware of today. Everyone who has reviewed our deep dive research in advance were as shocked as we are in discovering this information. If you do anything this year, you will want to read our deep dive research reports about operating your business online. You need to understand and educate yourself on how to work smart online.

Lesson Seven is on Click Fraud prevention and how to reduce your advertising costs online. All of our paid subscribers will be receiving the entire series of ten articles in July so join us as we give you the education you need on how to operate most successfully online. We have many hours of valuable research into this series.

Lesson Seven – Click Farms And Click Fraud

It is surprising few people are aware of click farms and how they drive up the cost of advertising for organizations. This Lesson Plan educates you on what they are, how click farms increase your marketing costs, and how to eliminate click fraud while advertising your brand and services.

A click farm is made of people hired to click on paid advertising links. Low paid workers click the links, surf the target website to drive up the cost of advertising for advertisers. It is “not illegal” anywhere in the world.

Click fraud is becoming a huge problem for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising customers. It is estimated that anywhere between 25% to 37% are invalid clicks generated by click fraud farms with varying degrees of sophistication utilizing programmed scripts (bots) or real people.

Web Crawlers And Scrapers

What are these?

Scripts(bots) are designed to crawl and scrape websites with the objective of collecting, indexing and cataloging data. Many invalid clicks are driven by web crawlers and scrapers tasked with collecting and indexing data.

How does this happen?

Search engines, travel aggregators, shopping sites and price comparison sites often deploy bots to scrape competing or affiliated sites for the purpose of data collection, real-time price adjustment and a variety of other reasons. These bot clicks are added to the advertiser’s remarketing audience and get retargeted, causing additional marketing cost/loss. They eat up your advertising dollars with no real return.

Automated Click Fraud

What is automated click fraud?

Hacker generated scripts (bots) are designed to mimic legitimate human traffic and perform actions which are tied to ad-spend like views, clicks, form fills, purchases.

How does this happen?

The organization getting paid for the action on your site increases their ad revenue by fraudulently inflating your traffic. It could be an ad network, a publisher or any party interested in inflating the numbers to drive up your ad costs. These automated bots are very sophisticated and are often hard to catch and remove.

Manual Click Fraud

What is manual click fraud?

People manually generate clicks on your ads to inflate traffic to your site. An individual or business competitor can hire a click farm to maliciously drain your ad budget. This is click fraud which increases your ad costs and the amount of revenue organizations receive for advertising your brand and services.

Click farms generate internet traffic for a site in the following ways:

• Generate fake website traffic
• Increase pay-per-click payouts
• Increase pay-per-impressions
• Increase followers and likes
• Increase comments on a site
• Channeling traffic to fraudulent sites to increase ranking
• Channeling traffic to increase domain authority
• Create backlinks and sharing of articles

Are Click Farms Illegal?

Click farms are “not illegal”. Surprisingly, there are no laws against click farms anywhere in the world.

According to ClickCease, financial and legal services were hit with around 25% invalid/fake clicks during 2020. Ninety percent of all pay per click traffic ad campaigns on Google and Bing are affected by click fraud.

How do you eliminate Click Fraud?

There are two ways:

1. Advertise with flat rate fee to control advertising costs
2. Hire a click fraud security service firm

If you are advertising with pay-per-click or pay-per-impression services, you have a 90% chance of fraudulent clicks according to ClickCease.

If you want to reach an audience focused on tax, financial and legal professional expertise, we invite you to join our flat rate advertising platform.

TaxConnections offers two flat rate programs that help control your annual advertising costs.

1. Silver Plan: $2,500 Set Up Fee and $500 Per Month for a 12-Month Period.
2. Gold Plan: $5,000 Set Up Fee and $1000 Per Month for a 12-Month Period

How do you benefit advertising on www.taxconnections.com?

1. Increase client acquisition activities and opportunities.
2. Increases distribution of your professional brand and services.
3. Build a trusted connection between your expertise and public.
4. Distribute your content to a highly focused audience.
5. You become part of a referral network we drive new clients to.
6. Connect with a steady stream of high net-worth individuals, closely held corps and executives in multinational corporations.
7. Control advertising costs and avoid click fraud altogether.
8. Be known for respecting prospective clients. Stop chasing prospects with hidden and embedded tracking advertising codes.

Contact TaxConnections at 858.999.0053 or kat@taxconnections.com for more information.