New to Adsense - is this correct?

Hi Ian,

Yes that's correct. You will need a bit of relevant content on your page before the bot will know what ads to serve up. Often it can take a while for them to show good ads as well. (Once I had to wait a few days for a brand new site before the ads were relevant to the keywords on the site).

Of course it helps if Google already knows what your site is about - relevant ads will show much quicker - often within 10 or so minutes.

If your site ranks for certain keywords in the search engines, then those advertisers bidding on those keywords are likely to show up in your adsense ads.

Hope that makes sense

Tracey

Hard to boil down in short manner but

There are 2 sides of the coin. Adsense is for publishers, like yourself where you agree to show ads that someone is willing to pay for, to attract leads. That is Adwords.

The system is based on mutual benefits. The paying Adwords client is at the top of the food chain. You provide the adspace, the billboard, and get paid every time you supply a lead to the Adwords client. The better the quality of clickers you supply, the happier the Adwords client and the more you get paid. To help you, Google will do their best to match up the relevancy of the ads displayed to ensure the paying Adwords clients get quality leads.

The quality score develops over time and affects both sides. You can get a low score but those putting out Adwords by bidding on keywords that lack relevance to their landing pages or products can also get low scores. This raises their cost per click. Low scores lower your payment per click.

Google tries to match Adwords ads they distribute to the provided Adsense space on your site mainly based on what content you have on your site. The better the ad bot understands what it is all about, the better the ad performance.

If the bots don´t understand what the site is about or feel it has no value to anyone, the ads become untagereted, go public service and so on down the trash bin.

The first times you put ads up they will often start as public service ads and gradually progress into paying ads of better relevance as the bots "learn" what your site is about. If your pages have very little traffic this will obviously take longer.

About the ads you mention, the format has little relation to the number of ads shown. Google may choose to show anything from 1 to 4 "ads" inside a 300x250 block. You can also opt in to having images or a mix within the same block.

There are several things you can do to ensure a good level of relevancy. One of the easiest is to simply help the bots get the picture and keep your content tight and focused around a single topic or phrase for each page. If all the topics and pages rotate around a specific theme or niche, the better. If your domain name helps, even better.

Off-topic from the Adsense questions but one of the better site infos that is also free is Mini Site University - Build Profitable Mini Sites That Generate Money 24/7 on Autopilot