[Build Backlinks Online] Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your
Conversion Rate'


Posted by tallen1985

SEOs can occasionally find ourselves guilty of focusing on just the following
few things:



Links
Rankings
Fun cuddly animals that Google keeps releasing from its algorithmic zoo



Quite often we are heard muttering that user experience isn't really our
problem. We are all about the above three points. However, as the job of SEOs
continues to become broader, requiring a greater number of skill sets, I think
user experience is something we can all work on. Besides, surely if we focus
some of our energy on this, we are going to end up with much happier users,
which in turn will result in higher conversions.


There are various ways to work on improving user experience, and of course,
conversion rate optimization also plays a part. Today, I want to focus on one
specific part of user experience â CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public
Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) â and why I think they
suck.

CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions

When you encounter a CAPTCHA, you are being asked the question,"Are you a
robot?" It's like asking a customer who is about to enter a physical store, "Are
you a thief?" before you allow them to walk through the door. So we used to
flood our users with these "questions:"






And from there we have now moved to this:






Literally every time I see one of the above it makes me wish that this was on
a nearby wall:





CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers

Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote a great post on CAPTCHA's effect on conversion
rates. He highlighted the fact that with CAPTCHA turned off, a company's
conversion rate would increase by up to 3.2%. It's worth noting that the CAPTCHA
type used in this test was based on the more traditional word format. That 3.2%
is a pretty big potential gain for a whole lot of companies.




Traditional Word Format CAPTCHA



CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem

At the beginning of 2013 it was announced that Ticketmaster was finally
ditching its traditional CAPTCHAs. Ticketmaster proceeded with an alternative
system by SolveMedia. The system presents users with an image or video, the user
then has to type a phrase associated with that image. In the video version of
the product, a descriptive phrase will appear which the user then has to copy
into a box below. If they are not willing to do this, they need to watch the
video for a certain amount of time (similar to YouTube advertising) before
continuing.




Right now, companies are producing variations of novelty products aimed at
helping us to stop spam from landing in our inboxes. Many products claim they
are aimed at improving the user experience by making this easier for humans.
They come in a variety of styles, ranging from completing a simple sum to those
that are image-based or even gamifying CAPTCHAs (such as Are You Human).


Yet all of these "solutions" create the same problem. I, the user, am trying
to complete a purchase, fill in a form, or even just submit a comment. And you,
the website, keep putting this frustrating technological barrier between myself
and my goal, just so you don't have to sort through a few items of spam.


Another major concern is that these products aren't particularly user-friendly
for those who are blind or partially sighted. Some simply offer the same audio
CAPTCHAs (and problems) that we have been experiencing for as long as we
remember.

CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users

The key difference for me with image-based products such as SolveMedia and
Minteye is that they seem to act as another opportunity to push an advert in
front of users. In some cases they force you to watch an advert just to progress
to the next page.






Users don't want to see adverts even when they are "subtly" placed around a
beautifully designed page. Yet, more and more we are moving away from giving the
user a choice about viewing an advert to the point where adverts are forced upon
them (ahem...YouTube).

So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?

Despite statistics like those shared by Casey Henry, the fact is that the use
of CAPTCHA is actually on the increase. Perhaps for many webmasters this is just
becoming common practice, almost the norm. After all, it's a quick fix that
means we, as webmasters, no longer have to worry about dealing with spam.


Figures from Drupal's usage statistics show that they alone have nearly
200,000 people using one of their variants of CAPTCHA. This is a barrier to a
more fulfilled user experience that doesn't seem to be going away.




https://drupal.org/project/usage/captcha

"CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines"

...according to a study carried out by Stanford University into the use of
CAPTCHA by humans. Yet, by testing more than 1,100 people, gathering 11,800
completed surveys, and studying 14,000,000 samples from a week's worth of data
from eBay, they revealed just how difficult CAPTCHA has become for humans.


The study showed that, on average:



Visual CAPTCHAs take 9.8 seconds to complete
Audio CAPTCHAs take much longer (28.4 seconds) to hear and solve
Audio CAPTCHA has a 50% give-up rate
Only 71% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of a CAPTCHA
Only 31.2% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of an audio
CAPTCHA



With around 1% of the audience currently using audio CAPTCHA, this is
potentially a huge market to lose.

So what is the solution?

There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA. For some sites, it may be
unavoidable. However, any solution that is extremely effective rapidly becomes
widely used, and as such, becomes a target for hackers.


There are some really simple solutions already out there that will help to
reduce the amount of spam you receive but won't interfere with your user
experience.

Akismet

Akismet provides an effective defence that has no impact upon your users. It
comes as a variety of plugins and is generally easy to implement on your site.
Akismet monitors millions of sites, constantly learning new methods to beat
comment spam.

The honeypot technique

Essentially, the honeypot technique is used to hide a field on a form from the
user. If this field is then filled in, the chances are pretty high it was by a
machine. The major downside to this method is that the form could be
accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be
useful to also label the field with something such as, "If you are human, don't
fill in this field".


We still ultimately have the problem that whatever we do to ensure a user
doesn't fill in the form, a malicious script could perform its own
interpretations by learning which labels mean that a field should be left alone.


However, the key benefit to this method is that the user isn't getting
punished by being asked to complete something that is irrelevant to their
actions.

Is it time you ditched your CAPTCHA?

I think we need to focus on what creates a better experience for users by
asking ourselves the following questions:



Is the amount of spam you are receiving really worth potentially losing
conversions?
If the answer is yes, is your CAPTCHA friendly to all users, including those
who are visually impaired?
CAPTCHAs are for robots, not for humans. Unfortunately, anything one person
can code to try and prevent robots from entering a site is something another can
find a way through. The real consideration is, are we just shoving our problem
with spam onto our customers?


When it comes down to it, CAPTCHAs lead to a negative experience on our
sites. They frustrate users, damage conversion rates, and they are not
particularly friendly to visually impaired users. Most of all, it is shifting
our problem onto our users. That's definitely not right. Getting rid of CAPTCHAs
will not only improve our users' experiences, but it will also improve the web
as a whole. This should be the beginning of the end of the CAPTCHA. If you have
a CAPTCHA, I urge you to remove it now!




What do you think?


Image credits


http://gizmodo.com/5980361/ticketmaster-is-dumping-awful-captchas


http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf


http://www.maggiesnotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Bang_Head_Here_25.jpg

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