I think that’s a great idea. One strategy is to integrate a blog into a website somewhat seamlessly in an effort to use the blog as bait to get people to visit the main website. That type of strategy is much harder to do when you use something like Blogger.

About.com is a good example. They have about 500 sub-domains. The home page of each sub-domain is a WordPress blog.

just to follow up - another good tip for people dealing with smaller samples is to be as specific as possible.

for example, if you’ve got a keyword ad on ‘broad match’, related terms will fire that ad in addition to the keywords you specified. that makes it more difficult to draw conclusions.

another way of doing this is to target ‘long tail’ terms. if someone clicks on an ad against the keywords “buy 5th grade math textbook today”, you can be surer of their motives than someone who clicks on an ad running against “math textbook”.

daniel

Here’s the link:

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Click on the link for the demo, which explains what it does and how it works.

(No, I don’t work for Google — just love many of their free tools!)

Aloha.

Another great tool to test performace of ads and stop guess working is Google’s new Website Optimizer. I’ve just started using it and I love it! I’d like to hear what you think about it.

It is difficult for small advertisers to measure ad performance, but I agree with you there isn’t as much to lose. It seems like the margin of error is negligible because the ability to experiment and use unconventional advertising methods actually gives a smaller advertiser an upper hand, take internet advertising for example, many small companies were able to compete with million dollar ad budgets just using SEO alone.