Duplicate Leads coming from form fills

[Rachit_Puri2]

Hi All

We have duplicate leads coming in from the web forms. We found a lead in the system where 8 duplicate records were created in Marketo from the same form, and same details. The time-stamp on all the records is almost the same. When I tested at my end, the form worked fine and no duplicates were created. Any idea how this might have happened?

Regards

Rachit

[SanfordWhiteman]

If the form is reposted very rapidly in a short timeframe (as you say, the timestamp is almost the same) this can happen because the inserts do not see the existing records yet, so do not perform a merge.

[Cady_Blaine]

@SanfordWhiteman Is there a way to prevent this from happening? I have something similar from records created back in December 2022 (same create date, same activity log, same fields/values but two different records). Understand that if I had caught this in real time, I should be able to wait for Marketo to process and auto-fix the dupe but this created duplicate records a few times now. Is it something about how the form is embedded onto the page? 

[Darshil_Shah1]

IMO in the ideal circumstances, the chances of this happening are pretty slim as there's always at least a few seconds of delay b/w the legit human form submissions from the same person, which in most cases should be sufficient for the previous form-post to get committed in the Marketo DB. I suspect these form fills could be from bots, and I'd suggest setting up the CAPTCHA on your form if you're seeing too many of such form fills.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Agree with Darshil here. There are 2 main causes of this behavior that I've observed:

• poorly written JS that auto-submits the form multiple times
• a bot submitting the form, which sidesteps the JS layer entirely and can be dealt with via reCAPTCHA

[Jo_Pitts1]

@Cady_Blaine ,

are you using a 'fancy' front end form along with a hidden Marketo form that is programmatically being filled and submitted when the front end form has its submit button pressed?

Can you send us a link to the page where this is occurring?

Cheers

Jo

[Cady_Blaine]

I've noticed it on this page: https://mountain.com/performance-tv/retargeting/

The developer also followed @SanfordWhiteman post from a while ago about installing recaptcha (https://iluv.marketingops.com/integration-for-marketo-and-google-recaptcha-v3). We tried this solution to combat bots but it created two records so I asked him to turn that off and I believe he installed recaptcha through Wordpress but not certain. I could have missed some steps within Marketo but I've never run into this problem before. Typically I've inherited an instance that already has everything set up.

I need a way for us to:

1) block bot submissions

2) prevent multiple records/spam from entering Marketo

Appreciate any recommendations! 

[Darshil_Shah1]

IMO reCaptcha can help you identify and prevent bot submissions, but no such service is 100% fail-proof. Marketo OOTB de-duplicates records based on the Email Address, so people with the same email address should not be created as duplicate records in Marketo on multiple form fills (unless you have custom de-duplicate rules in place and individual records have different values of the composite de-duplication criteria). Marketo now supports integrating reCaptcha v3 natively via Marketo Admin. Check this product doc here.

[Cady_Blaine]

Hi Darshil, we tried to implement this as well and I can't remember the situation but we ran into errors with that as well. I think it was due to embedding multiple forms on one page. Not my decision, slowly working us away from that lol

[Victor_Herrero]

Hi @Rachit_Puri2 , 

I am experiencing something very similar, also very high numbers, right now record at 15 copies. Did you figure out what it was?