Pardot Spam

Pardot Form Handler Spam Submissions

Pardot Form Handler Spam Submissions

If you are experiencing a high number of spam submissions through your Pardot Form Handler, there are various solutions available that can help to minimise, or hopefully even prevent this from occurring altogether.

Please continue reading to find out what these solutions are.

Add A Honeypot Field

You may be thinking, what exactly is a honeypot field?

Simply put, a honeypot is a hidden field that only bots can see when they visit your website. The bot is unable to recognise that this field is hidden and is not actually part of the form, so once it’s been populated and submitted Pardot automatically rejects the form submission.

If you are experiencing bot submissions and haven’t implemented a honeypot yet, we would recommend doing so. You can find information on how to do this here.

Enabling Captcha or reCaptcha

When using a third-party form on your website, it may well be possible to enable reCaptcha. Most third-party form services offer this functionality, so as a second step to preventing bot submissions, we would recommend investigating this further by contacting the form’s support team.

It’s highly likely that you’re not the first person looking for a solution of this type. So alternatively, check and confirm which form you are using and have a search on Google (other search engines are also available). The answer you’re looking for may well be staring you in the face!

Using a Server Side Submission

Bots are becoming more advanced in how they submit forms. So if you find that using a honeypot field and a Captcha/reCaptcha checkbox is not having the desired effect, another solution may be to set up a server side submission.

Bots will scan your website and look for endpoint URL’s where the form is submitted. However, by incorporating this technique, form submissions can be sent to an external server, which would then forward the form to Pardot. Using this technique prevents the bot from finding the endpoint URL.

Pardot Support will not be able to assist with this, so you will either need to contact the support team for whichever form you’re using, or alternatively, employ the services of a web developer.

Create A New Form Handler

It’s also possible that your existing form handler has been compromised. And sometimes, it can be best to create a new one altogether.

By doing so, the URL for the existing form handler will be invalidated and a new one put in its place.

Instructions on how to create a new form handler can be found here.

We hope you enjoyed this article and found the information to be beneficial. If you would like to read more of our articles, then please click here.