Optimize your advertising strategy - Part 1

In its AdSense program, google offers an array of products : 
Adsense for content 
Adsense for search 
Refferals 

The first critical task (after understanding each product), is to come up with the best possible combination of these products.

Of course, each website is unique and so requires a unique " Advertising strategy " combining AdSense and other advertising techniques. To help define the best AdSense strategy for your website we suggest you try and answer these simple questions : 
Do you have many returning visitors ? 

This is tipycally the case for a blog or a portal with constantly updated content (news, forums...). If this applies to you, we think you should not rely on refferals to yield much income as they only pay for "a first time install". Once the majority of your readers will have installed the reffered product (firefox, picasa, adwords, adsense subscription...) you won't be getting any more money from these ads. 
On the contrary, if you have mostly first time visitors, then refferals can be a good choice. 
Where do your visitors come from ? 

Again, if you are considering refferals, you should keep in mind that these can be restricted to some regions of the globe. For example, the google pack installation won't pay you any cent unless the person installing it is from the USA. Thus, if the majority of your visitors comes from England it is useless to put this product on your website. 
Is your design flexible 

In some cases, and particularly with some blogging services, you do not have total control over the lay out of your website. Then you may have only one place to put your ads which is less than 20 pixels high. In this case for example, you cannot put any ad unit since there is no suitable format offered. 
In some other situations, you may be using a CMS (Content Management System) to build your site and be confronted to the hard fact that the only region you can personalise is the menu (or sidebar). In that case we strongly recommend you use link units because they can be harmonously integrated into any menu.