It's an interesting post but I don't think the statistics actually support the conclusion. The 1st blog post referred 1'500 people -- we don't know how many actually visited the blog post. The second post had 3'000 visitors. Without knowing the bounce rate from the first post we can't compare these stats.
UPDATE: The other point to consider is that this is purely post-hoc reasoning. I can think of at least one alternative explanation -- the people who arrived from the first blog post were already motivated enough to click another link so they were more likely to purchase. Without doing some kind of experiment to differentiate these hypotheses we can't make a judgement one way or the other.
It probably sounds like I'm raining on the author's parade. That's not my intention. I really like that he's put these figures online and is trying to analyse. I hope I'm just showing that the issues are more subtle than they seem at first.
Hey Noel thanks for the feedback! For your first point about the blog post both of the stats that I referred to when it comes to visitors 1500 vs 3000 are both the number of people that were referred to the site from each blog post. So I wasn't talking about the traffic stats for the blog posts themselves, I was only talking about stats that I know for both of them which was how many times they referred visitors to DomainPolish.
I think that your second point is interesting. What do you mean by more motivated to click? I can tell you that the bounce rate on the home page was a fairly consistent 30% for both posts, which leads me to believe that people just trusted the site more when they read a review from someone else and felt more comfortable buying.
UPDATE: The other point to consider is that this is purely post-hoc reasoning. I can think of at least one alternative explanation -- the people who arrived from the first blog post were already motivated enough to click another link so they were more likely to purchase. Without doing some kind of experiment to differentiate these hypotheses we can't make a judgement one way or the other.
It probably sounds like I'm raining on the author's parade. That's not my intention. I really like that he's put these figures online and is trying to analyse. I hope I'm just showing that the issues are more subtle than they seem at first.