1. Upgrade Your Traffic

Many marketers underestimate the effect of
traffic quality. If your website, doesn’t
attract the right type of traffic, then how can you possibly find quality leads? Start on top of your online journey and strengthen the best performing traffic channels for lead generation. Firstly, ensure that you fully understand what traffic channels
drive traffic and lead to your website. A great online dashboard tool for visualizing traffic is Databox. A great online dashboard tool for visualizing traffic is Databox or
some of its alternatives.
Databox allows you to showcase key metrics of your online marketing campaigns on a single dashboard which is great for executives and people with no in-depth marketing background as well. Set-up your dashboard and include traffic data, e.g. via pie charts or table views.
As the next step, define conversion goals via
Google analytics which are based on the Thank-you page of your online forms. Every time a lead comes through, redirect them to Thank-you page URLs and define your goals accordingly to record goal conversions for based on the page views of the Thank-you page.
In Google Analytics, you can then track the Goal Completion Location and the Source / Medium of the leads. This data isn’t perfectly accurate and sometimes Google can’t identify the specific traffic source. Nonetheless, it’s a useful indication to understand where your leads are coming from.
Once you have this clarity you can
optimize your content and offers for those traffic channels. Improve website copy for the right audience, experiment with new lead offers and try out new traffic channels. The traffic can increase via different types of ads, or different content focus via the
blog.
2. Ask to Qualify
To handle contact form spam prevention effectively, let’s have a closer look into the lead capture medium for which you can use lead forms or
chat windows. Both of these capture mediums can help you drive leads, but they have very different use cases. Chats or chatbots are meant for support queries and are more flexible, while open conversations; web forms are better for lead capture and clearly defined offers.
The best way for website lead capture is via web forms. The problem with conventional forms is that they often look like they are made with no “love”. And this affects both the design and the user experiences (What type of questions you ask and in which order). Simple form structures, like "first name, last name, email, phone" attract contact form spam via bots much easier.
Firstly,
style your form suited to your brand and make it look visually appealing (LeadGen App has unlimited design options to make your form look beautiful and unique).
Secondly, ask qualifying questions, e.g. “What type of your solution are you interested in?”, “What do you want to achieve?” or also “What’s your budget?”. Add multiple choice questions like these for contact form
spam prevention and to block out bots. It’s harder for a bot to submit a form that has choice options, not just open text fields to fill in.
3. Use Multi-Step Forms
Multi-step forms ask the visitor different questions on a series of form steps. In contrast to single-step forms, only one form step is visible at a time. They can be a good alternative to basic forms that display form fields on one step only.
The benefit of multi-step forms is the improved user experience and chances for high conversion rates, even with a high number of form steps.
Think about it this way: In real-life conversations in person, would you rather ask one question at a time or tell the other person everything straight away? The same way it is online. Multi-step forms are more interactive, more user-friendly, less intrusive and the step-logic is less attackable by bots.
WordPress websites and form plugins are often targets of form spam. Multi-step forms are a better alternative to plain forms and provide a more interesting user experience at the same time. The also have a useful side benefit of stopping bots from filling out a form due to the nature of different steps and question types which are harder to go through for bots.
4. Fence Form Visibility
Most businesses have a specific targeted audience, also called
ideal customer profile, “ICP” or client avatar. An
ICP often contains preferred geographic locations. For example, a plumbing business based in a Seattle, Washington wants US customers only, possibly also Canadian, given the short distance to the Canadian border. All other kinds of other business enquiries via online forms are not sales relevant.
The good news is you can limit your forms to specific geographic locations. LeadGen App has a
geo-fencing feature for web form spam prevention that allows you to enable or disable form visibility based on all countries in the world. Only need leads from the US? Simply tick the United States as the country that you want to enable and disable the rest in one click as well. Visitors from Europe and elsewhere in the world will see your website version the same way, just without the LeadGen form.
Even if you are an international business, you can think of limiting certain forms for a few countries to increase quality. This is an extremely simple practice, takes you 1 minute only and has a big effect on the profile of your enquiries.
5. Use Google reCAPTCHA
Enabling a Google ReCAPTCHA field before a submission is an effective way to block out automated bot enquiries. It’s another tactic that serves as another element of contact form spam reduction. reCAPTCHA is not the most user-friendly practice though as it increases form completion time which reduces conversion rates. We recommend using the feature in longer web forms, e.g. customer surveys and longer service enquiries forms.
For simple single-step or short multi-step forms, you need to see if the trade-off of inmproved lead quality and possibly lower conversion rates is worth it. reCAPTCHA acts like a form spam filter, but can't give a 100% guarantee to stop contact form spam completely. It also can not help to eliminate low-quality enquiries, but still, it’s a useful practice that will help you combat form spam.
Google introduced
invisible reCAPTCHA in recent years which is no longer showing questions to users. Instead, invisible reCAPTCHA uses signals in users behaviour on the website to determine spam form behaviour. LeadGen forms uses invisible reCAPTCHA which provides a seamless user experience without asking intrusive questions.