HubSpot Ideas

joshatpyramid

Stop SPAM: Form Submission Feedback

I appreciate things like CAPTCHA to stop bots from submitting spam. However, we don't have any tools to actively root out click farm activity (or other bad actors) who are submitting junk data through Hubspot forms.


I know we can't ask for IP addresses of form submissions, but I'm sure they're being captured on the backend. If I could flag a contact as spam, and tie that to their form submission, Hubspot should be able to make note of that offending IP address.

 

Based on a number of those coming through, along with other indicators (name, domain, gibberish in free-form text fields) more spam submission should be catchable.

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I bring this up because while we can of course perform cleanup in the Hubspot CRM, our forms are wired up to send signals to ad platforms about successful conversions. It's my suspicion that these submissions are related to a bad actor trying to ruin our ad spend. While uncommon, I'm sure this isn't a completely isolated case.

7 Replies
JMasterson
Member

It is maddening how hard it is to flag spammers in Hubspot. I wish this were a lot easier.
The first step in qualifying a lead is to separate the spammers from real humans.

The system automatically treats everyone as a lead which is super frustrating.

JAviste
Participant

I am suffering the same frustration. The e-mail addresses have a suspicious, unlikely to be a real string of characters, yet at first glance believable because there seems to be an actual name, but it is repeated for no reason. Then there are the bogus phone numbers. And because I am tracking page visits I can see that my Google Ads are being clicked multiple times within a minute wasting my ad spend. I am at my wit's end. The sad thing is that the only logical explanation is that a competitor is paying someone to do this or they are doing it themselves. 

ZLeung
Participant

Agreed. Our contacts list in Hubspot keeps getting filled with spammers, and it's becoming increasingly tedious to have to manually clean up our list. It'd be much easier to be able to block the spammers right from the get go.

Albertpg
Member

Yes, considering the many tools out there for spam prevention, it shouldn't be difficult to add in some other features additional to CAPTCHA to avoid spammers in the first place.

MClouatre
Member

Agreed, click and conversion rates arent reliable due to bogus submissions and AD spend being effected as well. Really need a better way to identify spam before submission. 

MGreen0
Member

I manage two HubSpot instances and am seeing this, and the only suggestion so far is to buy more tech. Sigh. Ideas that could help:

 

- options for different CAPTCHAs

- some button/tag to flag spam

 

It's very frustrating because, as mentioned above, this is affecting our reporting and wasting our ad budget.

JAviste
Participant
I figured out the real culprit, at least in my case, and it was my Google Ads campaign where our ads were showing up in bogus places like gaming sites and this was just an invite to pranksters. Once that was fixed, the bogus sign-ups stopped.