I am relatively new to adsense and I like it a lot so far but my ads don't seem to reflect my content at all therefore I hardly get any clicks. I feel like it I could get some better ads up there I would get more clicks. I have a cooking site and for some reason 90% of the ads are about advertising. Any help would be appreciated. Is there any way I can select a category of ads I could have appear on my site?
if you are not getting relevant ads, then use adsense section targeting which will help http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23168
I believe the DART cookie shows ads relevant to what ever the user has searched for recently, including you, the site builder.
If you are new to adsense, chances are you are new to web development also or your site might be new. In that case rather than worrying about the relevancy of the Ads, work on your content. My Site's Name is Grasshopper Network and believe it or not for about a month Google kept displaying all the "Pest Control" Ads in most of the home page slot! It is irritating but then as you work on your SEO aspects, you start ranking for keywords and Ads become more relevant.
Section targeting is really helpful. But it does take some time for google to come crawl your site with the adsense crawler, so there can be quite a bit of lag before the ads match the content. In the meantime it does a best guess off the site name and the h1 of your page.
You should simply stop wasting time on anything that is adsense's job. ad targeting is the main point of using adsense, it is not to have to waste time picking the ads, otherwise everybody would stay with CPA/affiliates instead.. So let adsense display the ads it chooses, and focus on your only job as a publisher. If you don't like my answer, then go on wasting your time, I don't care, really.
Sometimes adsense completely misses though - I have an e-cards site and it would get credit card ads. A funny quotes site gets insurance quote ads. Completely irrelevant and until I put section targeting in I had a CTR of 0 on those two pages. Then back to normal once relevant ads were shown.
I understand what you are saying but it's hard to look at my site that I have worked so hard on and in between a barbecued chicken article and a beer can turkey article is a banner advertising bank loans. http://drunkenturkey.com
Your Adsense account has a setting to either display relevent ads to your website or to display relevent ads to what the user SEARCH. It surprises me that nobody seems to know that. Check your account settings.
I heard that it will take few weeks to show relevant ads for new web site because google Adsense bot have to crawl your site and then relevant ads will be shown.
Does 15# means it needs a time for spider to catch the website ? I am not sure . If so , why we have to pay money for adv . We can do SEO ourself ,right ?