So you’re cruising through your list management routine and bam! You see a huge spike in subscribers, only to realize they’re all bots. But don’t worry, there are some steps you can take to keep those pesky bots at bay and make sure your list is filled with real, engaged subscribers.
Make sure you’ve got a CAPTCHA turned on for your site. AWeber has a built-in CAPTCHA for our sign-up forms, but if you’re using a different form, definitely add one to keep those bots from crashing the party.
Turn on those confirmation messages. Sure, some people like to skip this step, but having it on can really cut down on spam sign-ups since bots are less likely to confirm their subscriptions. Plus, it helps make sure you’re getting subscribers who are actually interested in your content.
Also, think about where your traffic is coming from—if you’re driving people to your sign-up page and seeing a bunch of spam sign-ups, it might be time to try a different traffic source.
Got any other tips that work for you in keeping spambots away? Have more questions about managing your subscribers? Hit us up in the comments below!
Going further into what Amanda mentioned about traffic sources, not all traffic sources are the same quality. Display advertising on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms might yield better results than, say, someone promoting your offer as part of a “solo ad” that they send to their own email list. Some marketers will market their solo ad services and promise a certain number of signups or conversions from their list. If that marketer is less trustworthy, they might use bots or a click farm to fulfill the promised signup numbers, and those signups might include either invalid email addresses that will bounce, purpose made dummy emails that will not engage with your content, or even addresses taken from other people without their permission which could result in spam complaints against your messages.
This is a more hardcore option, but if you are seeing bot signups coming from the forms directly installed on your website and you aren’t pursuing any new sources of advertising traffic, you might want to look into some additional security products for your website to block or shape traffic from unusual locations. Services like Cloudflare offer a way for your website to analyze and block traffic with suspicious characteristics so that they won’t be able to view your site at all, forms and everything else included. This can also be helpful if there’s an abnormally large amount of bot traffic hitting your website and slowing it down, which could be the beginning of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Cloudflare is one of the bigger players in this space and they have a variety of plans from free to enterprise depending on the extent of security products you need.
. But don’t worry, there are some steps you can take to keep those pesky bots at bay and make sure your list is filled with real, engaged subscribers.