Spam submissions are an inevitable reality for any page with a form, and dealing with them poses a constant challenge. Not only do these unsolicited entries clutter your database and make legitimate lead management difficult, but they also introduce bad data into your system, making it harder to trust the quality of the information you collect.
Effectively managing this junk data is crucial for maintaining a clean, reliable system. This guide explores essential, actionable spam prevention measures you can implement today to protect your forms and maintain data integrity, ensuring you only receive valuable information.
- 1. Implement Invisible reCAPTCHA on your workspace by following our guide from here: https://d.pr/SXUV8u. It's a handy tool that detects suspicious traffic by making checks in the background. With all of this, it is not failproof, and it's best paired with the following measures.
- 2. Use a validation rule for your email address field. Especially since a lot of spam leads will be using shady domains, you can target them through code, as indicated in this guide: https://d.pr/sAOMxM and this will validate form submission strictly based on email domain.
- 3. Use a honey pot field to identify bot submissions. This can be done by adding a blank hidden field to your form, as shown here: https://d.pr/w9GrMG. This field cannot be filled in by actual visitors, only by bots. Once you see details in this field, it will help you identify fake submissions.
- 4. The above measure works best alongside a lead-management CRM integration, where you can set up automations to exclude from your list submissions those that have a value for this field. If you are not using one, check out our list of integrations here: https://d.pr/czcZ3e.
- 5. Regarding CRMs, you can integrate your landing pages with one that offers a double opt-in method, such as Mailchimp. This will ensure that, once someone tries to submit the form, they will also have to click on Confirm in the email that they receive from that specific CRM. You can read more about adding a double opt-in with Mailchimp here: https://tinyurl.com/4shrhn3d
- 6. Another option would be to add an extra step to the form, which involves a 2-step authentication method through which the visitors will have to complete the form by adding a code they receive via email or phone number. This option involves your own custom code, through which the snippets will have to be added in the following section: https://d.pr/MVhsEX.
- 7. You can exclude IP Addresses in Google Ads (if you are using it for your campaigns). Here's some documentation on this matter: https://d.pr/IuGOkc. To find the IP addresses, you can download the leads as shown here: https://d.pr/IeIhnq and you will find the IP addresses in this file.
- 8. Also, you can download the leads data to check the IP address as mentioned above and if you notice any pattern, with the help of a developer, you can implement a custom code solution to target and block those recurring IP addresses from submitting your form.
- 9. Another important aspect that would help is to try to make sure that you do not share the URL of the page with other third-party social platforms that you don't have control over (e.g. Facebook Groups, other forums) and to be aware of how exactly the page is promoted.
- 10. As a last resort, if all of those recommendations won't solve the problem and this becomes a bigger issue, we recommend moving the page to a different URL so that you start the promotion again with the new URL and make sure that this is not shared elsewhere.
Our team can provide support for custom code features that are presented in our Help Center guides. We cannot offer assistance or guarantee the functionality of any other 3rd party scripts.
In case you need help with custom functionality or any code customization that is not provided through our Help Center articles, we have a Professional Services team that can help our Convert users. The Convert plan includes Professional Services as well as additional features and services that can be seen here: https://instapage.com/convert-benefits