HubSpot Forms, Spam & Conversion Rates
We’ve been experiencing some issues with spam form submissions. Particularly from paid campaigns. We’ve enabled reCAPTCHA on our HubSpot forms to help prevent spam submissions on the website.
There are a couple of things that could be worth updating in HubSpot so I thought I’d share some feedback here.
The reCAPTCHA puzzle is tedious and is definitely affecting form conversion rates. I also tested the form in incognito using a standard non-spammy Gmail account and the reCAPTCHA task appeared. It’s meant to only appear for suspicious submissions so I’m not 100% clear about when and why this fired.
Ideally, HubSpot needs to upgrade to reCAPTCHA v3. There are too many limitations with the puzzle form. Also, a simple ‘I’m not a robot’ checkbox would be much cleaner than the puzzle.
Honeypotting — would be cool to see a form settings option for this as well. I.e. Hidden option form fields with automation to flag as well
Finally, the CAPTCHA box is ugly. Not being able to hide this or edit the size/styling in CSS is frustrating… especially when you’ve built a form from scratch in Design Tools.
It’s important to note reCAPTCHA is controlled entirely by google, and google being google they don’t share much, if anything about what triggers the reCAPTCHA puzzles or how they attempt detect bots. This is simply embedded by HubSpot into the form, they would have no control over how it actually works.
There are a few important things to note however.
The reCAPTCHA is a *bot traffic detection* tool, not a spam form submission tool. This means when it detects the web page traffic is coming from a bot, it will challenge it (via the puzzle). The form is designed to not allow a submission to go through without the reCAPTCHA resolving, but it’s not passing data to the reCAPTCHA to be verified. This means I could technically have the email “Imastupidrobotlol@androids.com” as my email and still pass reCAPTCHA and it has deemed me a human. HubSpot has some built in email verification tools but it’s not absolute, it’s very difficult to verify freemail provider email addresses as they all *technically* could be real emails.
Definitely agree, I know there was some conversation around the future of reCAPTCHA when the costs came in but I believe HubSpot went for the enterprise option since hCAPTCHA is a lot worse for puzzles. I’d definitely recomend giving this feature request an upvote and posting your feedback there to the product team!
Not exactly a honeypot but there’s an interesting strategy that @danmoyle uses outlined in a great post from him here.
Again, this is really down to google. reCAPTCHA v2 and 3 don’t allow for customising the styling.