Connect with us

SEO

5 Amazing Landing Page Examples To Inspire Your Own

Published

on

5 Amazing Landing Page Examples To Inspire Your Own

Landing pages – they’re powerful, aren’t they?

When we click on an ad, it’s the landing page that helps us decide what to do next.

Ideally, it makes you do a double-take and proclaim, “I must have this!”

It can also fall flat and go viral for all the wrong reasons. (I’m looking at you Rainbow capitalism.)

The design of a good landing page is an intersection of art, marketing, and psychology.

And, if you’re reading this article, that means you’re looking for guidance and inspiration to improve your own landing pages.

That’s exactly what we’re going to do.

We are going to share the features of what makes an amazing landing page and break down five examples to learn from.

Features Of An Amazing Landing Page

The hard truth: Getting people to opt in is tricky.

Even when the tech is amazing and the product is innovative.

If you send visitors to a webpage that fails to communicate the value, all of your market research and product development efforts go right down the drain.

The good news is this article is all about helping you create amazing landing pages that encourage more conversions – and, ultimately, generate more customers.

Improve your success rate by weaving these six features into your landing page design.

Poppin’

Landing pages should be distraction-free in order to focus on the task at hand – getting the visitor to convert.

This means that top navigation can be ditched in favor of a sleek, one-page design. Just be sure to leave a clickable logo in case users want a way out but still want to interact with your brand.

Revealing the product with clear annotated product visuals, helps visitors picture themselves using it.

Most importantly, the page has to pop! An eye-catching hero image and visuals help to capture the visitor’s attention and convey what the offer is in a way our brains can process quicker.

Free Of Fluff

The copy on a landing page is one of the most important elements. It’s what convinces website visitors to convert.

Great landing page copy uses strong headlines, clear value propositions, and explains “why” they matter.

Content should focus on user benefits over product features and address any doubts so visitors don’t leave.

The copy should be focused and free of fluff; every word should serve a purpose.

FOMO

FOMO is real. One of the most powerful persuasion techniques that landing pages can use is social proof.

If we see that others (we respect) are doing it, we are more likely to do it, too. This is the business equivalent of your mom asking you, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”

…Yes, yes I would.

You can create FOMO by featuring testimonials from happy (relatable) customers or including statistics about how many people are using and loving the service or product.

Ready, Set, Go

A landing page shouldn’t feel like trying to break out of an escape room.

You need a strong call-to-action (CTA) if you want the visitor to convert.

A strong CTA is clear, concise, and explains why it’s important for the visitor to take this action.

A clear and concise call-to-action is just one action and the button contrasts with the page – this is so users can’t miss it.

Need For Speed

Page speed is how quickly a webpage loads. Basically, make sure it loads fast so people don’t leave. That’s it.

5 Examples Of Landing Pages

An amazing landing page is one that helps website visitors feel that this is the right company (or the right product) for the job.

And, there’s no better way to learn about what makes an amazing landing page than by exploring real-world examples from some of the best landing pages on the web.

Here are five examples of amazing landing pages.

1. ASOS

British online retailer ASOS is among the world’s most valuable apparel brands, competing with Nike, Adidas, and Zara.

This means there must be something really special behind those marketing strategies that online retailers can learn from.

Let’s see what they’re doing right.

I searched for [wedding guest plus size dresses] and saw a search network ad from ASOS which took me to a landing page for women’s plus size dresses for U.S. web visitors.

Screenshot from ASOS, June 2022.

For starters, the ad took me directly to a landing page related to my search query – I love when that happens.

The full-length thumbnails of plus size models, moving in the dresses, helps me immediately know that I’m in the right place and I can begin to imagine myself in the product.

Top navigation breadcrumbs let me know exactly where I am on the site, so if I want to go back and see all the curve clothing, that’s really simple to do.

Filters are front and center for me to further refine my search by how new it is, eco-responsibility, color, price, and more.

Sales copy is free of fluff allowing the user to focus on the product (clothes). Description of the category page does include reference to which brands to check out for trending styles.

All in all, it’s a clean, well-organized landing page that keeps attention directly on the product.

ASOS may want to test adding social proof to their landing page by adding a filter based on user reviews or engage FOMO by highlighting that an item is selling fast.

2. DRIFT

B2B commerce startup Drift is a conversational marketing and sales technology company, well known for its live chatbot.

It is one of the only Latino-founded companies to ever achieve a valuation over $1 billion.

“Our purpose as a company remains simple and consistent: Build a platform that makes it simpler for customers to buy from you,” Drift CEO David Cancel said in a statement.

Let’s see how simple Drift makes their product to buy and check out their live-chat landing page.

B2B SaaS landing page exampleScreenshot from DRIFT, June 2022.

Ok, I am geeking out over the bright and minimalistic design (slight 90s vibes); it looks so sharp on all devices.

Above the fold, we see a big, bold headline immediately addressing how the app helps business owners “engage and convert” with Drift’s solution “live chat.”

Below the headline, the content block explains why users are not engaging or converting: “Today’s buyer doesn’t want to wait.”

Nice contrasting color on the CTA inviting web visitors to “Get a Demo.”

The header image uses the product as the example which is 10x better than a stock photo.

And, I have to call out the shield icon in the bottom left-hand corner that opens privacy settings. This small addition provides site visitors with a subconscious affirmation that the company takes data privacy seriously.

As we scroll down the page, we see social proof with a video review by the senior director of a global marketing operations and technology company.

Video testimonial on landing page exampleScreenshot from DRIFT, June 2022.

If you can get video reviews, do it! They are way more engaging than a standard text review because they’re really hard to fake.

Continuing to scroll down the page, the content teeter-totters between sharing different use cases with a summary and image or .gif and social proof in the form of a text quote or case study.

At the end of the long-form landing page, there is a solid call to action “start conversations with your website visitors now.” With a contrasting button, “Get a Demo.”

Bottom of page CTA landing page exampleScreenshot from DRIFT, June 2022.

When you click on “Get a Demo” it launches the product itself and you interact with the Drift bot to book a demo.

Drift’s live chat page checks off all the features of an amazing landing page, making it extremely easy to buy from them.

3. LawnDoctor.com

Lawn Doctor offers lawn maintenance and pest control services, but it’s not your run-of-the-mill landscaping company.

This lawn care brand has grown to more than 630 locations, increasing its year-over-year sales by 16% in 2020.

Local service providers can learn a lot from Lawn Doctor’s landing page. Let’s take a look at how they’ve designed their landing page to attract new customers.

local service provider landing page exampleScreenshot from Lawn Doctor, June 2022.

Lawn Doctor is such a great example for local service companies.

The color palette uses the rich color of green consumers wants to attain with a hero image featuring what the site visitor wants, a beautifully landscaped backyard.

Social proof is visualized with the 4.7 star average Google rating overlay on the image. The exact number of 4.7 is helpful because it feels like a real number and not an approximation.

The estimate form is available at the top; users don’t have to go scrolling for it, and a phone number is available in the top right corner for those that don’t want to wait.

When I enter my zip code into the form, the city and state are automatically populated for me which is awesome because I get lazy and don’t want to enter every detail.

Sales copy gets right to the point; the header explains you’re getting customized lawn care with a scientific approach.

The word choice “custom” and “scientific” makes me think that I’m getting a better service than I would from anyone else.

Below the header image but above the fold, Lawn Doctor upsells me services that are highly relevant to the current season.

I can click on that CTA to learn more or I’m more likely to ask about it when a sales representative calls me.

Just in case a user had any hesitation, there is a 100% refund if I’m not fully satisfied, followed by Google reviews for social proof.

The only thing this page is missing is the fear of missing out which Lawn Doctor could do with a countdown discount timer.

4. Flywheel

Flywheel was acquired by WordPress in 2019.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but in an interview, Heather Brunner confirmed Flywheel’s annual recurring revenue was $18 million at the time of acquisition.

What made Flywheel so successful? Aside from being a great managed WordPress hosting platform, the company’s marketing was dialed in. Take a look!

eBook landing page exampleScreenshot from Flywheel, June 2022.

Top navigation is not present, helping the page visitor to stay focused on the content you want them to.

The logo reminds site visitors where they are and is clickable providing an easy escape back to the main domain.

The beautiful color scheme with the calm business blue and contrasting money green call-to-action button above the fold.

The headline includes the word “free” letting visitors know they won’t have to pay for the download.

Text is broken up into chunks making it easy to read on mobile.

ebook landing page example_show the productScreenshot from Flywheel, June 2022.

Below the fold is a mini-preview of the chapters so I know what I’m exchanging my personal information for. Gives me a sense of whether or not it’s worth it to me.

The final CTA at the bottom of the landing page reinforces that the ebook is completely free and filled with secrets! The download is a quick and simple company email.

ebook landing page example_bottom of the page ctaScreenshot from Flywheel, June 2022.

Form completion confirmation takes me to the product home page to further explore the product. All in all a beautiful ebook landing page that lead gen companies can learn from.

The only suggestion here is to add social proof near the bottom CTA to “seal the deal.”

5. Breathwrk

Breathwrk is a female-founded startup that raised an undisclosed amount from a total of 10 investors including Demo Lovato and BAM Ventures.

The breathing exercises app has over 1.2 million users worldwide.

Let’s see if the landing page can reduce our stress and improve landing page design?

The search query for this landing page was, “how to handle stress at work.”

App landing page exampleScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

The main Navigation is simplified, which keeps the users focused on the information you want them to look at.

But if they click the “More” button a drop-down list of additional pages (Science, FAQ, Blog, and more) is available.

The color palette is calming tones of blue and green with a contrasting CTA button “contact us” in purple.

Just like Drift, Breathwrk shows the product which allows site visitors to see what they’re going to get.

The headline starts with the main idea, “Improve your workplace,” and the subheading tells us how to “help your employees reduce stress and improve focus…”

Followed by the FOMO by showcasing the companies who are using the Breathwrk app for their employees.

As we scroll down the landing page, Breathwrk does a brilliant job explaining the app’s features from the perspective of the user.

App landing page example_explaining features as user benefitScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

A user doesn’t really care that there’s an option for breathing exercises before meetings but a user is interested in reducing employee stress and improving focus between back-to-back meetings, and before a big pitch.

The sales copy minimizes objections by explaining that the app is easy to set up and easy to manage.

App landing page example_reduce objectionsScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

This is important because the last thing an organization needs is stress setting up an app to reduce stress.

Easy onboarding, ongoing support, and user analytics (so you can see if employees are using the app and how they’re using the app).

Breathwrk provides social proof in the form of text review quotes right before the CTA “Get Breathwrk for your team” and form fill.

App landing page example_social proofScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

An amazing example of an App landing page. It grabs attention, shows the product, and explains how it creates value for the site visitor.

Final Thoughts

Overall, an amazing landing page helps site visitors decide what to do next.

Some features to consider when designing a landing page is:

  • The design captures visitors’ attention and keeps it on the end goal.
  • Copy is focused and free of fluff.
  • Use social proof and FOMO.
  • Minimize objections and have a clear CTA.
  • Make sure it loads fast.

And, don’t forget to set up Analytics to measure and learn from user activity. Testing is going to be your secret to success.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Mila Supinskaya Glashchenko/Shutterstock



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

SEO

Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Published

on

By

Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Mozilla published the results of a recent third-party security audit of its VPN services as part of it’s commitment to user privacy and security. The survey revealed security issues which were presented to Mozilla to be addressed with fixes to ensure user privacy and security.

Many search marketers use VPNs during the course of their business especially when using a Wi-Fi connection in order to protect sensitive data, so the  trustworthiness of a VNP is essential.

Mozilla VPN

A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that hides (encrypts) a user’s Internet traffic so that no third party (like an ISP) can snoop and see what sites a user is visiting.

VPNs also add a layer of security from malicious activities such as session hijacking which can give an attacker full access to the websites a user is visiting.

There is a high expectation from users that the VPN will protect their privacy when they are browsing on the Internet.

Mozilla thus employs the services of a third party to conduct a security audit to make sure their VPN is thoroughly locked down.

Security Risks Discovered

The audit revealed vulnerabilities of medium or higher severity, ranging from Denial of Service (DoS). risks to keychain access leaks (related to encryption) and the lack of access controls.

Cure53, the third party security firm, discovered and addressed several risks. Among the issues were potential VPN leaks to the vulnerability of a rogue extension that disabled the VPN.

The scope of the audit encompassed the following products:

  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for macOS
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Linux
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Windows
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for iOS
  • Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Androi

These are the risks identified by the security audit:

  • FVP-03-003: DoS via serialized intent
  • FVP-03-008: Keychain access level leaks WG private key to iCloud
  • VP-03-010: VPN leak via captive portal detection
  • FVP-03-011: Lack of local TCP server access controls
  • FVP-03-012: Rogue extension can disable VPN using mozillavpnnp (High)

The rogue extension issue was rated as high severity. Each risk was subsequently addressed by Mozilla.

Mozilla presented the results of the security audit as part of their commitment to transparency and to maintain the trust and security of their users. Conducting a third party security audit is a best practice for a VPN provider that helps assure that the VPN is trustworthy and reliable.

Read Mozilla’s announcement:
Mozilla VPN Security Audit 2023

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Meilun

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Published

on

Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website.

For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign:

In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with link outreach and how to get better results. 

How to do link outreach

Link outreach is a four-step process:

1. Find prospects

No matter how amazing your email is, you won’t get responses if it’s not relevant to the person you’re contacting. This makes finding the right person to contact equally as important as crafting a great email.

Who to reach out to depends on your link building strategy. Here’s a table summarizing who you should find for the following link building tactics:

As a quick example, here’s how you would find sites likely to accept your guest posts:

  1. Go to Content Explorer
  2. Enter a related topic and change the dropdown to “In title”
  3. Filter for English results
  4. Filter for results with 500+ words
  5. Go to the “Websites” tab
Finding guest blogging opportunities via Content ExplorerFinding guest blogging opportunities via Content Explorer

This shows you the websites getting the most search traffic to content about your target topic.

From here, you’d want to look at the Authors column to prioritize sites with multiple authors, as this suggests that they may accept guest posts.

The Authors column indicate how many authors have written for the siteThe Authors column indicate how many authors have written for the site

If you want to learn how to find prospects for different link building tactics, I recommend reading the resource below.

2. Find their contact details

Once you’ve curated a list of people to reach out to, you’ll need to find their contact information.

Typically, this is their email address. The easiest way to find this is to use an email lookup tool like Hunter.io. All you need to do is enter the first name, last name, and domain of your target prospect. Hunter will find their email for you:

Finding Tim's email with Hunter.ioFinding Tim's email with Hunter.io

To prevent tearing your hair from searching for hundreds of emails one-by-one, most email lookup tools allow you to upload a CSV list of names and domains. Hunter also has a Google Sheets add-on to make this even easier.

Using the Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk directly in Google SheetsUsing the Hunter for Sheets add-on to find emails in bulk directly in Google Sheets

3. Send a personalized pitch

Knowing who to reach out to is half the battle won. The next ‘battle’ to win is actually getting the person to care.

Think about it. For someone to link to you, the following things need to happen:

  • They must read your email
  • They must be convinced to check out your content
  • They must open the target page and complete all administrative tasks (log in to their CMS, find the link, etc.)
  • They must link to you or swap out links

That’s a lot of steps. Most people don’t care enough to do this. That’s why there’s more to link outreach than just writing the perfect email (I’ll cover this in the next section).

For now, let’s look at how to craft an amazing email. To do that, you need to answer three questions:

  1. Why should they open your email? — The subject line needs to capture attention in a busy inbox.
  2. Why should they read your email? — The body needs to be short and hook the reader in.
  3. Why should they link to you? — Your pitch needs to be compelling: What’s in it for them and why is your content link-worthy?

For example, here’s how we wrote our outreach email based on the three questions:

An analysis of our outreach email based on three questionsAn analysis of our outreach email based on three questions

Here’s another outreach email we wrote, this time for a campaign building links to our content marketing statistics post:

An analysis of our outreach email based on three questionsAn analysis of our outreach email based on three questions

4. Follow up, once

People are busy and their inboxes are crowded. They might have missed your email or read it and forgot.

Solve this by sending a short polite follow-up.

Example follow-up emailExample follow-up email

One is good enough. There’s no need to spam the other person with countless follow-up emails hoping for a different outcome. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested.

Link outreach tips

In theory, link outreach is simply finding the right person and asking them for a link. But there is more to it than that. I’ll explore some additional tips to help improve your outreach.

Don’t over-personalize

Some SEOs swear by the sniper approach to link outreach. That is: Each email is 100% customized to the person you are targeting.

But our experience taught us that over-personalization isn’t better. We ran link-building campaigns that sent hyper-personalized emails and got no results.

It makes logical sense: Most people just don’t do favors for strangers. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—it does—but rarely will your amazing, hyper-personalized pitch change someone’s mind.

So, don’t spend all your time tweaking your email just to eke out minute gains.

Avoid common templates

My first reaction seeing this email is to delete it:

A bad outreach emailA bad outreach email

Why? Because it’s a template I’ve seen many times in my inbox. And so have many others.

Another reason: Not only did he reference a post I wrote six years ago, it was a guest post, i.e., I do not have control over the site. This shows why finding the right prospects is important. He even got my name wrong.

Templates do work, but bad ones don’t. You can’t expect to copy-paste one from a blog post and hope to achieve success.

A better approach is to use the scoped shotgun approach: use a template but with dynamic variables.

Email outreach template with dynamic variablesEmail outreach template with dynamic variables

You can do this with tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream.

This can help achieve a decent level of personalization so your email isn’t spammy. But it doesn’t spend all your time writing customized emails for every prospect.

Send lots of emails

When we polled 800+ people on X and LinkedIn about their link outreach results, the average conversion rate was only 1-5%.

Link outreach conversion rates in 2023Link outreach conversion rates in 2023

This is why you need to send more emails. If you run the numbers, it just makes sense:

  • 100 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 1 link
  • 1,000 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 10 links

I’m not saying to spam everyone. But if you want more high-quality links, you need to reach out to more high-quality prospects.

Build a brand

A few years ago, we published a link building case study:

  • 515 outreach emails
  • 17.55% reply rate
  • 5.75% conversion rate

Pretty good results! Except the top comments were about how we only succeeded because of our brand:

Comments on our YouTube video saying we succeeded because of our brandComments on our YouTube video saying we succeeded because of our brand

It’s true; we acknowledge it. But I think the takeaway here isn’t that we should repeat the experiment with an unknown website. The takeaway is that more SEOs should be focused on building a brand.

We’re all humans—we rely on heuristics to make judgments. In this case, it’s branding. If your brand is recognizable, it solves the “stranger” problem—people know you, like you, and are more likely to link.

The question then: How do you build a brand?

I’d like to quote our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo here:

What is a strong brand if not a consistent output of high-quality work that people enjoy? Ahrefs’ content team has been publishing top-notch content for quite a few years on our blog and YouTube channel. Slowly but surely, we were able to reach tens of millions of people and instill the idea that “Ahrefs’ content = quality content”—which now clearly works to our advantage.

Tim SouloTim Soulo

Ahrefs was once unknown, too. So, don’t be disheartened if no one is willing to link to you today. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Trust the process and create incredible content. Show it to people. You’ll build your brand and reputation that way.

Build relationships with people in your industry

Outreach starts before you even ask for a link.

Think about it: People don’t do favors for strangers but they will for friends. If you want to build and maintain relationships in the industry, way before you start any link outreach campaigns.

Don’t just rely on emails either. Direct messages (DMs) on LinkedIn and X, phone calls—they all work. For example, Patrick Stox, our Product Advisor, used to have a list of contacts he regularly reached out to. He’d hop on calls and even send fruit baskets.

Create systems and automations

In its most fundamental form, link outreach is really about finding more people and sending more emails.

Doing this well is all about building systems and automations.

We have a few videos on how to build a team and a link-building system, so I recommend that you check them out.

Final thoughts

Good link outreach is indistinguishable from good business development.

In business development, your chances of success will increase if you:

  • Pitch the right partners
  • Have a strong brand
  • Have prior relationships with them
  • Pitch the right collaboration ideas

The same goes for link outreach. Follow the principles above and you will see more success for your link outreach campaigns.

Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter X.



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Published

on

By

Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Researchers discovered a way to defeat the safety guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the ability to generate harmful and toxic content, essentially beating a large language model with another large language model.

The researchers discovered that the use of tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of attack was useful for jailbreaking another large language model.

What they found is that the ToT approach was successful against GPT4, GPT4-Turbo, and PaLM-2, using a remarkably low number of queries to obtain a jailbreak, on average less than thirty queries.

Tree Of Thoughts Reasoning

A Google research paper from around May 2022 discovered Chain of Thought Prompting.

Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting strategy used on a generative AI to make it follow a sequence of steps in order to solve a problem and complete a task. The CoT method is often accompanied with examples to show the LLM how the steps work in a reasoning task.

So, rather than just ask a generative AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT to do a task, the chain of thought method instructs the AI how to follow a path of reasoning that’s composed of a series of steps.

Tree of Thoughts (ToT) reasoning, sometimes referred to as Tree of Thought (singular) is essentially a variation and improvement of CoT, but they’re two different things.

Tree of Thoughts reasoning is similar to CoT. The difference is that rather than training a generative AI to follow a single path of reasoning, ToT is built on a process that allows for multiple paths so that the AI can stop and self-assess then come up with alternate steps.

Tree of Thoughts reasoning was developed in May 2023 in a research paper titled Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (PDF)

The research paper describes Tree of Thought:

“…we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving.

ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.

Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities…”

Tree Of Attacks With Pruning (TAP)

This new method of jailbreaking large language models is called Tree of Attacks with Pruning, TAP. TAP uses two LLMs, one for attacking and the other for evaluating.

TAP is able to outperform other jailbreaking methods by significant margins, only requiring black-box access to the LLM.

A black box, in computing, is where one can see what goes into an algorithm and what comes out. But what happens in the middle is unknown, thus it’s said to be in a black box.

Tree of thoughts (TAP) reasoning is used against a targeted LLM like GPT-4 to repetitively try different prompting, assess the results, then if necessary change course if that attempt is not promising.

This is called a process of iteration and pruning. Each prompting attempt is analyzed for the probability of success. If the path of attack is judged to be a dead end, the LLM will “prune” that path of attack and begin another and better series of prompting attacks.

This is why it’s called a “tree” in that rather than using a linear process of reasoning which is the hallmark of chain of thought (CoT) prompting, tree of thought prompting is non-linear because the reasoning process branches off to other areas of reasoning, much like a human might do.

The attacker issues a series of prompts, the evaluator evaluates the responses to those prompts and then makes a decision as to what the next path of attack will be by making a call as to whether the current path of attack is irrelevant or not, plus it also evaluates the results to determine the likely success of prompts that have not yet been tried.

What’s remarkable about this approach is that this process reduces the number of prompts needed to jailbreak GPT-4. Additionally, a greater number of jailbreaking prompts are discovered with TAP than with any other jailbreaking method.

The researchers observe:

“In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM.

TAP utilizes an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts using tree-of-thoughts reasoning until one of the generated prompts jailbreaks the target.

Crucially, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks.

Using tree-of-thought reasoning allows TAP to navigate a large search space of prompts and pruning reduces the total number of queries sent to the target.

In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for more than 80% of the prompts using only a small number of queries. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box method for generating jailbreaks.”

Tree Of Thought (ToT) Outperforms Chain Of Thought (CoT) Reasoning

Another interesting conclusion reached in the research paper is that, for this particular task, ToT reasoning outperforms CoT reasoning, even when adding pruning to the CoT method, where off topic prompting is pruned and discarded.

ToT Underperforms With GPT 3.5 Turbo

The researchers discovered that ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo didn’t perform well with CoT, revealing the limitations of GPT 3.5 Turbo. Actually, GPT 3.5 performed exceedingly poorly, dropping from 84% success rate to only a 4.2% success rate.

This is their observation about why GPT 3.5 underperforms:

“We observe that the choice of the evaluator can affect the performance of TAP: changing the attacker from GPT4 to GPT3.5-Turbo reduces the success rate from 84% to 4.2%.

The reason for the reduction in success rate is that GPT3.5-Turbo incorrectly determines that the target model is jailbroken (for the provided goal) and, hence, preemptively stops the method.

As a consequence, the variant sends significantly fewer queries than the original method…”

What This Mean For You

While it’s amusing that the researchers use the ToT method to beat an LLM with another LLM, it also highlights the usefulness of ToT for generating surprising new directions in prompting in order to achieve higher levels of output.

  • TL/DR Takeaways:
  • Tree of Thought prompting outperformed Chain of Thought methods
  • GPT 3.5 worked significantly poorly in comparison to GPT 4 in ToT
  • Pruning is a useful part of a prompting strategy
  • Research showed that ToT is superior to CoT in an intensive reasoning task like jailbreaking an LLM

Read the original research paper:

Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically (PDF)

Featured Image by Shutterstock/THE.STUDIO

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending