Form spam deals with spam bots filling out forms on a website. Online forms are used for a variety of reasons. They are most commonly used for generating leads to a marketing team or providing some kind of online registration. Form spam usually occurs when there is no authentication required to submit the form.
Take for example, a lead generation campaign that’s setup for the sales and marketing team. You would never require authentication because it would drive your conversions way down. Typically when leads come through a website from filling out a form, they are first sent to the marketing team. The marketing team then has to filter out all of the legitimate leads and send them to the sales team. If the marketing team is receiving a ton of bogus leads with incorrect contact information that was generated by bots, this causes a big waste of time and money.
There are forms on just about every website and they usually require you to fill out your contact information with name, email, address, phone, etc…In exchange for your contact information, you’ll gain access to information, articles, or even items for download.
Ways to prevent Form Spam
There are a few tactics you can leverage on your own to prevent form spam on your website. Here’s a few options…
Captcha
The captcha is a very common method to reduce form spam and we’ve all experienced this if we spend anytime online. Captcha’s are used commonly during signups, filling out forms, during a transaction, etc., to prove that you’re a human. The captcha is a box that pops up and requires the user to enter what they see in the empty box. It’s typically words or numbers that the user is required to type in to prove that a human is actually interacting with the site and not a bot. Spam bots have a hard time reading captchas. Here are a couple examples of captchas.
While captchas can be pretty effective, they can have a negative effect on conversion rates. If you’ve ever filled out a captcha, you realize how annoying they can be. These days, users expect a really quick and smooth user experience in anything they do online. If you require a user to solve a captcha, it’s just another step in the process of filling something out online. A lot of users abandon ship when a captcha appears simply because they don’t want to spend the time. Not to mention, as bots become more sophisticated, so do the captchas. This makes it more difficult for users to solve the captcha, causing multiple attempts.
Each use case is different and should be considered on a case by case basis. For example, if i’m filling out a form to get something really important, like purchasing a product or service, then I’m probably more inclined to solve the captcha. However, if i’m looking for something that’s free and isn’t necessarily very valuable to me, I’m more likely to abandon the process. So it’s a matter of being strategic and understanding where it makes the most sense to place a captcha.
Honeypot
A honeypot is a trick you can use on your forms where you place a field within the form that’s invisible to humans. Even though humans can’t see the field, the bots can. When a bot is crawling your site and reads the editable fields in a form, they will also read the honeypot field and fill it in as well. Therefore, when the honeypot field is filled in, you can easily filter it as spam. Here is an example of a honeypot field…
