How Do Advertisers Find Sites

[Forest Dweller]

I'm in a very small niche and Adsense does a good job of targeting ads on all my pages, but I've noticed something interesting. I'm starting a small niche directory and I've got it installed in my site, but I'm still adding links and I've not put a link to it from any other page yet.

I put an Adsense block in the sidebar and it started showing a lot of neat ads for widgets that I've never seen advertised on my site before. I don't have any pages about these widgets other than the category pages in my directory.

The interesting thing is that now these new widget ads are popping up all over my site. I'm not certain how Adwords works, but did bringing the ads in with my directory's category keywords somehow alert the advertisers that my site was related to their products? Or did I nudge the Google algorithm for my site a little?

I guess it could be a coincidence. It has at least made me think about how I can broaden my audience a bit.

[AussieWebmaster]

AdSense works as a contextual ad server... it looks at the content on the page and uses that to determine what ads to show.
Once it has the keywords it pulls the best ads into the first box etc.

[Forest Dweller]

I guess I was hoping that something more was going on. Sadly, it's probably just a coincidence. Oh well ... back to the drawing board!

[naitsirhc26]

Conscerning advertisers and finding sites, am I deterring possible advertisers by giving my channel names things like, About Us - Ad Unit, About Us - Link Unit, Home Page - Ad Unit, etc, etc..? Or can they still choose to run ads on my site even without channels?