Ads don't match keywords

How do I get more targeted ads to show up?

[kellymonaghan]

After experiencing good results with AdSense on other sites, I wanted to experiment with them on a site where I have hesitated to implement the program for fear of running ads for my competitors.

I have a site about "How To Be A Widget Person." Part of that site is a "Widget Industry Dictionary." My idea was to make each dictionary entry a separate (and therefore tightly focused) page on which I could feature Google ads.

I experimented with the definition of the term "red thing," which is only very glancingly associated with the term "widget." The page looked like this:

****
Define red thing [h1 tag]

red thing. A whoosis from the U.S. government.

[in small type] The Widget Industry Dictionary is a service of www.MySite.com

*****

The URL for the page ends in /red-thing.html
The title tag is "Define red thing"
The description tag is: A definition of red thing as used in the widget industry.
the keywords tag is "red thing"

I expected the Google ads to be for sites dealing with red things. But no, the ads are for sites about how to be a widget person. My competitors in other words.

It would seem the overall subject of my site overrules the tightly focused content of this particular page.

I know I can add competing sites to the AdSense URL filter. But that raises another question: How do I determine what those sites are without clicking on the ads that come up -- which is a big AdSense no-no.

Any thoughts, suggestions, etc. will be appreciated.

While waiting for responses, I will put up a few more pages for dictionary terms not closely associated with the term "widget" and see what happens.

[kellymonaghan]

Update: when I went back to the "red thing" page, the ads were no longer for my competitors. They didn't seem to have anything to do with "red thing," but that's another issue. From this I deduce that AdSense, initially selects ads based on the keywords for the site as a whole and then refines itself to more closely reflect the keywords of the particular page, and that this happens pretty quickly.

Also, other pages I tested displayed much better targeted ads.

I also figured out how to learn which sites ads point to. Duh!

So maybe I've answered my own question.