Are Your Visitors Human or Spam ?

In the endless battle against spam, ‘CAPTCHAs’’ – computer-generated images asking for visitors to type in copied letters and numbers to prove they’re human – may put potential customers off and prevent conversions!

Sometimes it seems there are just too many obstacles to think about, which lie hidden in wait, and prevent your site visitor from staying engaged long enough to complete a sales transaction! The CAPTCHA device attached to most form filling requests may yet be another one!

It’s an essential online business requirement, especially for eCommerce, to ensure maximum website accessibility and that your website design provides a satisfyingly easy and understandable experience to keep your visitor interested. Otherwise their journey could all fall apart at the last hurdle! Just because you’re trying to protect all parties concerned against a relentless tide of spam!

But the hard truth is, as a recent survey shows, although CAPTCHAs do reduce spam conversions, it also seems to significantly increase the number of conversions that fail.

In a six-month study across 50 websites, half used CAPTCHA on their forms and the other half didn’t for the first three months of the study. For the last three months, the settings were reversed.

The results show that with CAPTCHA enabled, there was an 88% reduction in spam to only 11, but 7.3% – or 159 conversions, were also, either detected as spam or failed. When CAPTCHA was disabled, of 2,134 total conversions, 4.1% (91) were recorded as spam.

The question is, would you rather deal with 91 spam conversions or lose 159 conversions, some of which were almost certainly genuine?

CAPTCHAs can be effective, especially in high-volume environments, and their use should be evaluated carefully on a case-by-case basis. If you’re using CAPTCHAs on your websites, it probably makes sense to consider whether the pros outweigh the cons.

Where you determine that CAPTCHAs can be of value, you can minimize failed legitimate conversions by:

• Choosing a CAPTCHA system that is legible – to ensure your CAPTCHA doesn’t turn legitimate users away.
• Offer an audio CAPTCHA – to assist users who have trouble reading the letters/numbers they’ve been presented.
• Make it easy to refresh – thereby, making it easy to try a new one, ideally, without reloading the page completely.
• Provide instructional copy – to help your users understand what a CAPTCHA is and how to complete.

You don’t necessarily need to include a CAPTCHA on every form you display. Only when a first layer of filters flags a suspicious conversion, e.g. when the expected referrer is not present or when a form is loaded by a user with a non-typical geographic region IP address.