Don't Let CAPTCHA Kill Your Hard Won Website Marketing Conversions
Stop putting the spam burden on potential customers and gain more conversions.
CAPTCHAs are useful tools to fight spam, but they’re also bad for your internet marketing conversion rates. CAPTCHAs put an unnecessary barrier between your visitors and the action you want them to take. Stop letting CAPTCHAs kill your conversions by following these tips and tidbits of thought.
What Does CAPTCHA Do?
When you set up CAPTCHA for your blog or website, it does a great job at blocking spammers and scammers who could harm the integrity of your site. A real person should be able to successfully enter CAPTCHA letters and codes, but many have a hard time making out those wavy letters and nonsense phrases. And what about your visitors who may have impaired eyesight or a low tolerance for frustration? Do you want to give them up as customers? Of course not.
Do CAPTCHAs Work?
Whether or not CAPTCHAs work is hard to say. Some websites have success using them, and other websites hit technical difficulties. When they work correctly, CAPTCHAs work reasonably well to accomplish the goal for which they were designed. But what are they doing to legitimate conversions? For the answer to that question, we refer to a site with some of the most knowledgeable folks in the world when it comes web design and its effect on conversion metrics. That’s right, I’m talking about the folks over at Moz (you may remember them as SEOMoz).
Casey Henry is a web developer with a passion for SEO and author for Moz. In his article, CAPTCHA’s Effect on Conversion Rates, he offers some hard numbers that may interest you. In conversion tests with CAPTCHA turned on or off, the resulting conversion numbers suggest that websites using CAPTCHAs are losing out on 3.2 percent of their conversions. Ouch!
Using CAPTCHA certainly has its benefits, but the number of failed conversions can increase dramatically when using the technology. Meanwhile, spam bots get smarter and CAPTCHAs need retweaking. It’s an ongoing battle that’s sapping your resources and driving business away.
Who is CAPTCHA for, Anyway?
Face it, CAPTCHA isn’t for your customers. It’s for you and it’s placing a burden on the site visitors that you want to convert. Why would you ever put an obstacle between the visitor and a conversion, especially when there are other spam fighters out there that have no negative affect on your visitors?
Instead of throwing up obstacles, try tools like Askimet or create a time monitor limiting responses to the appropriate time for a human to respond, but much to slow for a bot. If you feel you must have a spam gateway, try something like Are You Human, a small interactive game that requires a much simpler level of human interaction than a CAPTCHA does.
Income versus Spam
When it comes down to it, you are choosing between losing income and dealing with spam. Most people would rather just deal with the spam if it means higher profits.
Let efelle show you better ways to fight spam in your web design.
efelle knows that CAPTCHAs are more than annoying. They’re sapping profits. Let our web design experts help you redesign a spam fighting system that will help conversions, rather than hurt them. Call us at 866.394.7520 or use our online contact form for a free web design consultation.