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CAPTCHA Can Kill Your Conversion Rate

Guest post by: Jeff Ogden

Article Overview: Want better results and less abandoning of your website forms? Lose the CAPTCHA…

CAPTCHA Can Kill Your Conversion Rate

by Jeff Ogden, President of the B2B lead generation consultancy, Find New Customers



I HATE CAPTCHA. I’ve many times typed it over and over before giving up. Then click on the audio and it is completely muffled and impossible to understand. I give up. I’d say almost 1/2 of all CAPTCHA are completely unusable.

By the way, we’ve removed all CAPTCHA’s from Find New Customers – it’s simply not a match with our company culture of service.

_______________________



More and more websites are using CAPTCHA to avoid spam, but they’re typically bad for your business as CAPTCHAs have major usability problems. Most visitors simply get them wrong.

Why CAPTCHAs Are Bad For Business From the perspective of a web developer, CAPTCHA may seem like a great solution to prevent spam. However,from a business perspective CAPTCHAs can be pure poison as they have a lot of usability problems:

• CAPTCHAs are difficult to decipher. This is what makes them technically good, however, obscuring text and asking your visitors to repeat that text will hurt your conversion rate badly. And let’s face it, even people working with websites daily read a CAPTCHA wrong every now and then.
• CAPTCHAs carry no meaning. Most CAPTCHAs are just a random combination of letters and numbers, leaving your visitors with little clues as to whether or not they got it right before submitting the form. Additionally, even if they do read it correctly, because it have to be an exact match there’s also the risk of your visitor simply mistyping it.
• Your visitors don’t understand what CAPTCHAs are for. Why are you forcing them to go through an eye exam and spelling test? Some will be annoyed that you’re treating them like a 3rd grader, others may even feel insulted.
• People with lowered vision can’t read your CAPTCHA. This makes it near impossible for them to read the already mangled characters of your CAPTCHA.

Some visitors will leave you site immediately when they see your CAPTCHA simply because they don’t understand what it’s for (problem 3). The visitors that do understand it, but are either unable to see it (problem 4), can’t read it (1) or mistyped it (2), will get so frustrated that there’s a good chance they will leave your site too. (AMEN!)

Are you willing to take this chance? My suggestion is to set up a split test where you remove the CAPTCHA and then compare the value of the extra conversions against the extra hassle of deleting some additional spam.

If You Still Need A CAPTCHA… If you absolutely, positively must implement a CAPTCHA on your site, then at least consider these 6 ways of making you captcha more user friendly:

1. Use a huge CAPTCHA so your visitors won’t have to go scrambling for their reading glasses.
2. Make the CAPTCHA ask for real words or sentences so your visitors can deduce the characters that are really difficult to read from the characters that are easier to read.
3. Reload just the CAPTCHA if your visitor gets it wrong so he don’t have to fill in all the other form fields on the page again.
4. Give your visitors an option to get a new CAPTCHA image so they have the possibility to get another.
5. Tell your visitors you’ve implemented the CAPTCHA to prevent spam. This way you at least explain to them why they need to through all that hassle and some visitors may even sympathize with you, as they themselves have trouble with spam.
6. Only ask your visitors to type your CAPTCHA once through the entire session. E.g. if you have a service for getting price quotes, don’t show a CAPTCHA at every request, only during the first request.
7. Use a simple CAPTCHA – like numbers or real words. For instance, I’ve seen “What is the sum of 7 plus 5? Or give me a few words and tell me type the third word. Those are much easier for humans and damned near impossible for SPAM.

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Article Tags: b2b lead generation, btob lead generation, find new customers, lead generating, lead generation companies, sales lead generation, sales leads



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No follow tags for Google - Hi Louis, From my experience when you are first starting up a blog or forum you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved and give them an incentive to do so. I would suggest not including the no follow tags at the beginning because you are looking for participation and every new comment is treated like gold and is a validation that you are doing something right. As your site grows the spammers will pick up on it and you might have to take proactive steps. For these forums, for example, we had to implement a new CAPTCHA system. We were getting so many people trying to spam the forums promoting their websites and not adding value to the community. The new CAPTCHA system makes it a little more difficult to sign up but our spam has dropped to almost nil. Spammers go for the route of least resistance so if they cannot get into your site they have lists of thousands of other sites to harass.
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Re: Google Places Review | How to Get a Review on Google Places? - Hi Evan, Yes, I am planning more. I have multiple videos coming out this year on: Social media marketing Email marketing Lead Generation Organic search marketing Conversion rate optimization Analytics Content marketing Paid search marketing I am looking for SEO / Internet Marketing questions people have. I enjoy producing videos answer tuff SEO questions. Let me know if you are any of your members have any they want answered. Jeff
Re: EvanCarmichael.com Directory? - [quote="ideasuniversity":2n5zsmhv][quote="Evan":2n5zsmhv]Thanks Cheryl for the suggestion! The biggest hurdle we've had in considering creating a directory is getting spammed and not having the resources to moderate it effectively. I'll keep it on the list though! Thanks again![/quote:2n5zsmhv] Spamming has become the canker worm on Internet that cannot be easily removed. This should not stop us from this noble idea. I believe in the future there will be effective ways for us to fight spamming[/quote:2n5zsmhv] If you use CAPTCHA and make people confirm their email address before their account goes active that should help. There are other measures you can take too like maybe make them be a member for a certain number of days before they can do anything with the directory. Maybe add another moderator to help with the directory, etc...


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