Preventing spam submissions

  • 22 February 2016
  • 7 replies
  • 1184 views

We have some landing pages that I’m pretty sure are being filled in by bots.

The names used are typically foreign, and don’t have LinkedIn profiles (b2b landing pages).

The email addresses used are mainly Yahoo/Gmail or domains that don’t have websites on them.

The phone numbers used are often too long or too short.

How are people getting round this? Our landing pages only get PPC traffic and the URLs have not been published elsewhere.

I can’t seem to find a way of installing a captcha on Unbounce?


7 replies

Hi Tom,

There are a few things you can do to deal with this.

Firstly you can stop submissions being made from the free email addresses, so no Gmail, yahoo, Hotmail etc meaning they can only use valid domain names usually associated with legitimate business emails.  Or use a data validation service to check the email/domain exists before allowing submission.

Secondly, make sure there is telephone number validation added to your form, the basic validation is native to unbounce but again you can extend this yourself or with a telephone number validation service. 

If you’re after a ReCaptcha then I would recommend the Google ReCaptcha API, I’ve not actually used it on  Unbounce but tbh it shouldn’t be that hard to implement, you may just need to jig things around a little bit and include a custom validation to Unbounce standard jQuery.validate rule set.  https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/intro

You’ll need to be comfortable with Javascript, HTML and CSS to get this done. If you need some assistance with the coding of the project reach out to me on my email stuart@digitalenrich.com and we can talk further. 

I’d also add a couple fields onto your form to start gathering some data on where these leads came from and a little bit of script so you can see what the referring website/source was. Maybe you can do other things to shut down the source of the spam. For instance, we have just blocked Russian traffic from our servers as we have no clients who do any business with  Russia and nor do we at this time, it accounted for 1/3 of our server traffic from Russian bots and email hacking attempts. Our pages now serve faster to legitimate users and our spam attacks have halved. If this is a bit much then fall back on Google analytics data and see if you can find the trends, should be fairly easy to spot. 

I hope that helps a little, its just the tip of the iceberg but should be enough to solve your problems. Give me a shout if you need any more help.

Cheers

Stuart.

Stuart, can you share more about adding fields to teh form to gather data on the location the leads come from? As well as the referring website? I have hidden fields set up to catch my google utm parameters, but I am not sure how to add a straight “referrer” or location of submitter field.

Thanks!

Stuart, I tried to email you at stuart@digitalenrich.com but I got a delivery error. You might want to look into that. 

I’d love to enlist your help with implementing a google recaptcha and cleaning up our bot traffic. 

Reach me at matt@socialrevenuebuilder.com

Hi Matt,

Apologies about that, I’ll look into the email issues, had a fair few coming through today but I recently changed some firewall features so I may have been a tad… aggressive. Really appreciate the heads up on that. 

Email on it’s way to you so we can discuss what you need 🙂

Cheers

Stuart.

Hey stuart, 

I haven’t seen your email but I’m ready to chat when you are

Hi Matt,

Apologies about these emails, i’ve sent you a couple now and they keep bouncing back to me. I’m still looking into why.

I’ve received your email over the weekend, if you could ping me the  url of your landing page across that would be great and I’ll take a look and see whats involved with getting the captcha setup.

Cheers

Stuart.

Has anyone successfully integrated this on their landing page? Care to share the url?

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