Adsterra Review 2026: Lucrative Ad Network and Your Google Adsense Alternative

Adsterra is a global advertising network with a unique Partner Care approach, generating over 36B impressions per month. Over the years, it has established itself as a reputable and competent ad network serving advertisers and publishers across an array of verticals and more than 248 GEOs. Among the ad types offered by Adsterra, you will find a range of ad formats: Popunder ads, Social Bar (unique!), Interstitials, and In-Page Push notifications. 

Are you curious to learn more? Whether Adsterra is right for you will be revealed in this Adsterra review.

Adsterra History

Get ready to be intrigued by Adsterra, a global ad network that has a compelling backstory.

The company was founded in 2013 by a bunch of friends who were experts in web development and affiliate marketing with (as of now) 20+ years of experience. What began as a small company quickly grew into one of the most successful digital marketing networks worldwide, collaborating with more than 60k+ partners. Today Adsterra is a recognizable brand respected by many players in the industry.

Adsterra Overview

The ad network has a robust security system, transparent stats, and a dedicated support team to ensure that its partners get genuine traffic and high-quality service. 
Social Bar is possibly the most noteworthy ad format at Adsterra. This format is aimed to increase click-through rates (CTR)  up to 30 times compared to traditional web push ads and comes in several visual designs. Social Bar ads look like friendly notifications, icons, widgets, or custom lead forms. Social Bar has several high-converting subformats, for example, Interstitial and In-Page Push. A more detailed description of the format can be found on the Adsterra website.

Beyond a unique ad format, Adsterra is proud of its Partner Care approach focused on building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with its partners. By providing high-quality support and guidance, the company strives to help its partners achieve their goals and maximize their revenue potential. In addition to their Partner Care approach, Adsterra offers a valuable resource for its members: a free affiliate marketing course.

By using Adsterra, publishers can make more profits from their website traffic while advertisers and affiliates can benefit from increased exposure of their offers. For sure, affiliates will be overjoyed by the “Offers Wishlist” section in the advertising account.

Adsterra Network Traffic by Ad Formats

Adsterra traffic comes from over 45,000 direct publishers worldwide. Provided traffic categories: Mainstream and Niche. Also, users are free to run their ad campaigns on both traffic types (main and non-mainstream).

Besides classic push ads, Adsterra provides Social Bar, a new revolutionary ad format. According to the Adsterra Traffic Chart, Social Bar ad campaigns deliver the highest ROI for users.

The company was founded in 2013 by a bunch of friends who were experts in web development and affiliate marketing with (as of now) 20+ years of experience. What began as a small company quickly grew into one of the most successful digital marketing networks worldwide, collaborating with more than 60k+ partners. Today Adsterra is a recognizable brand respected by many players in the industry.

Adsterra Overview

The ad network has a robust security system, transparent stats, and a dedicated support team to ensure that its partners get genuine traffic and high-quality service. 

Social Bar is possibly the most noteworthy ad format at Adsterra. This format is aimed to increase click-through rates (CTR)  up to 30 times compared to traditional web push ads and comes in several visual designs. Social Bar ads look like friendly notifications, icons, widgets, or custom lead forms. Social Bar has several high-converting subformats, for example, Interstitial and In-Page Push. A more detailed description of the format can be found on the Adsterra website.

Adsterra at a glance

Reach: 36B+ impressions per month

GEO: 248 countries

Multiple  ad formats: In-Page-Push, Popunder, Social Bar, Interstitials

Market Segment: Advertisers and affiliate marketers, publishers

Beyond a unique ad format, Adsterra is proud of its Partner Care approach focused on building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with its partners. By providing high-quality support and guidance, the company strives to help its partners achieve their goals and maximize their revenue potential. In addition to their Partner Care approach, Adsterra offers a valuable resource for its members: a free affiliate marketing course.

By using Adsterra, publishers can make more profits from their website traffic while advertisers and affiliates can benefit from increased exposure of their offers. For sure, affiliates will be overjoyed by the “Offers Wishlist” section in the advertising account. 

Adsterra Network Traffic by Ad Formats

Adsterra traffic comes from over 45,000 direct publishers worldwide. Provided traffic categories: Mainstream and Niche. Also, users are free to run their ad campaigns on both traffic types (main and non-mainstream).

Besides classic push ads, Adsterra provides Social Bar, a new revolutionary ad format. According to the Adsterra Traffic Chart, Social Bar ad campaigns deliver the highest ROI for users.

Social Bar includes such known subformats as In-Page Push and Interstitials.

The juicy thing regarding Adsterra traffic is its anti-Adblock technology that helps to get around the restrictions on showing ads. Your ads will reach users without obstruction and will have a higher CTR.

How to Get Started on Adsterra 

The first thing you need to do when creating an ad campaign is to register. 

Let’s get started. 

Step 1. Sign Up

Click the Sign Up button, and proceed to register as an advertiser. A form will open, fill it in.

As you proceed with the form, you may find out that the platform works based on the CPA model apart from CPC and CPM. This fact sticks Adsterra out among a multitude of similar solutions. 

Once you finish the initial steps, log into the Adsterra advertiser account.

Step 2. Add funds

Depending on the payment method, users can replenish their accounts independently or by request. To make a deposit, go to the Finance tab and follow the instructions.

Acceptable payment options:

• Bank cards (MasterCard/UnionPay/Visa)
• Paxum
• Wire Transfer
• PayPal
• Digital currencies

If you wish to top up your account via Wire, contact your manager.

Adsterra minimal deposit is $100 for almost all payment modes except for Wire, which requires $1000 and digital currencies — $200.

Step 3. Install Conversion Tracking

A postback is a must for running a CPA campaign and strongly recommended when selecting the rest of the Adsterra pricing models. In the first case, you would be able to track the conversions you pay for. When it goes to CPC and CPM models, the postback provides you with the data you can use for better optimization. 

The setting up tracker option is available on the Tracking tab. 

Adsterra is integrated with the popular conversion tracking solutions on the market:

• Tune
• Cake
• Voluum
• Binom
• BeMob
• Keitaro
• AdsBridge
• RedTrack
• CPV Lab Pro
• AppsFlyer

There is an option to test whether a conversion tracking system works properly and choose a postback type. The rationale for choosing a postback type is based on the currency you are going to use and the need to keep track of the conversion price.

Step 4. Create a Campaign

Click “Create Campaign” and get down to the long-awaited part – creating the first ad campaign. Actually, the previous steps – signing up, onboarding, conversion tracking setup and adding funds – don’t take much time thanks to the easy-to-navigate platform and user-friendly interface.

Before you start setting up your ad campaign, we advise checking out the Freebies and Bonuses section.

As a respectful ad network, Adsterra collaborates with many services, including spy tools, landing page builders, trackers and web analytics systems. So benefit from the perks Adsterra partners share. 

Pinpoint some general details

In the Required Settings tab, set the name of your campaign. The team recommends using the offer name to recognize the campaign easily further. 

Next, choose your preferred connection and traffic type, device, ad format and pricing type: CPA, CPC or CPM model. As CPA is usually more expensive than the others, it is less common as a cost model. At the same time, this strategy can wind up the most profitable. So Adsterra offers the alternative which is testing CPM zones for detecting promising traffic sources before launching the CPA ad campaign. 

The following step is to add the landing URL and upload the landing page preview if you want to speed up the verification process.

Define the GEO, budget and time of campaign start

Modify other settings under the Required tab based on your requirements.

• Countries

It is possible to assign individual bids to each country you target. You can also set up targeting by specific regions and cities if needed. When picking the CPC or CPM pricing model, you can make use of the Traffic Estimator to predict the approximate either Adsterra CPC rates or its CPMs that vary by the GEO and other campaign settings. As for CPA campaigns, the test is needed first.

• Budget

Here you can set a budget, including a test one to run CPA ad campaigns. The budget can be unlimited if you wish. 

• Time of start 

This section replaces the campaign schedule. You can point out the time of start which is quite convenient for promoting some specific offers, but there are no possibilities to set up users’ time zones and limit ad displays on the weekend or workdays. 

The tweaked ad campaign can already be launched even at this stage, without setting up cappings and limits. This is an option for those who want to go for a test drive or are not fussy about the remaining settings.

Set up targeting options, cappings&limits

In the Optional Settings section you can adjust your targets by the following device characteristics: 

• OS
• Carrier
• Browser language
• Browser
• Day of week
• Time range

Then, go to the Capping & Limits setup tab.

Frequency and spending limits are advanced enough here as the user can set them by hours which gives full control over the budget and ad display. 

The minimal budget per day is $25.

Step 5. Optimize your ad campaign with Advanced settings

Depending on the data you already have or your experience, create whitelists and blacklists. You can also set your IP targeting to focus on certain IP ranges or exclude them. 

The final touch is configuring custom bids. Since each ad campaign is unique, advertisers can fine-tune their ad campaigns according to the data received from the tracker to generate the best ROI.

Click start and wait for Adsterra to approve. As a rule, the campaign moderation takes up to 12 hours but usually it gets approved in around 10 minutes. 

How to Use Adsterra Optimization Features

Advertisers can have complete control over their campaigns with the Adsterra platform, setting up custom bids and creating whitelists and blacklists. 

Each offer is individual and may require a different approach when it comes to bidding, which is where custom bids come in handy. Thanks to custom bids, advertisers can set bids for their campaigns based on their own statistics, rather than relying on the average results provided by Estimator. 

Whitelists&blacklists is another powerful tool for advertisers on Adsterra. Whitelists allow advertisers to select specific websites or apps where they want their ads to be displayed. This can be particularly useful for targeting a specific audience or ensuring that their ads are being shown on high-quality websites. On the other hand, blacklists allow advertisers to avoid low-quality websites or sites or non-relevant sources. With Adsterra’s updated interface, blacklisting can be done in one simple click right from the Stats page, without manually inputting placement IDs. 

Adsterra also has smart optimization tools like Smart CPM and CPA Goal. They allow for better optimization and will save you money if you use them properly.

Top Verticals Offered by Adsterra

Adsterra earning tricks lie in how well you utilize its various ad formats with its top-performing verticals.

The best verticals at Adsterra:

• iGaming & Sports
• VPN & Utilities
• Antivirus
• Mobile Subscriptions
• Dating / Social
• Browser Extensions / Addons
• E-commerce
• Sweepstakes

Adsterra Support

Whatever problem you may face on the platform, the support team is ready to help you adjust your campaigns to get the maximum profit. You can reach the support through Skype, instant messengers, email, and Live Chat right on the ad platform. The support team is in touch 24/7. 

Is Adsterra Advertising Network safe?

To steer clear of the increasing threat of ad fraud and prevent its advertisers from getting victims, Adsterra equipped its platform with a 3-level security system. It can detect and filter out bot traffic and provide a risk-free environment for its advertisers. Traffic is checked not only automatically, but also manually.

Pros and Cons of Adsterra

Is Adsterra good? We won’t be able to answer that without weighing Adsterra advantages and disadvantages.

Adsterra Ad Network: Is it Worth It?

Adsterra is a legit and worthwhile platform for advertisers due to its high-quality traffic from 45K+ direct publishers internationally and wide ad coverage equal to 36B+ impressions per month. Social Bar is alone worth it, not to mention multiple other benefits. As shown by the Traffic chart on the platform, its Social Bar format has proven to be successful in making a great profit. 

Take a look at case studies to see how other companies have used the format effectively.

• Case study with Interstitial (iGaming, Philippines)
• Case study with Social Bar (Dating, Tier-1 countries)

Furthermore, as already mentioned Adsterra has been repeatedly awarded over the years and keeps getting recognition to date. By the end of 2025, Adsterra has taken home trophies in several nominations from well-known industry awards: Affbank Awards, uCompares Awards, Offervault.

Adsterra for publishers

Adsterra is a great platform for advertisers but it wouldn’t be a wholesome review if we entirely omit the fact that the platform also brings value to publishers and webmasters.

Moreover, there are plenty of ad formats to choose the ones best fitting for the website niche and design: Social Bar including In-Page Push and Interstitials, Banners, Popunders, and Native ads. If you don’t have a website, it’s no trouble because with Adsterra Smartlink you can monetize your social media traffic without having to build an actual  website or blog. 

Adsterra is free for publishers, and has an impressive set of tools that help them monetize their traffic:

• Quick setup with moderation completed in just 1 minute
• Attractive CPM rates for higher earnings
• Option to block unwanted ad categories
• Automatic payouts every two weeks starting from just $5
• Wide choice of payment options: PayPal, WebMoney, Paxum, bank transfer, local, and digital currencies
• 100% fill rate plus Anti-AdBlock technology that can boost revenue by up to 35%
• Accepts all types of legitimate traffic: desktop, mobile, social media, messengers, apps, or blogs (e.g., WordPress, Blogspot, Blogger)
• Compatible with a variety of sites and niches: Movies, News, Downloads, Streaming, Social traffic, Entertainment (incl. Anime, Sports, Lifestyle), Web Tools (incl. URL Shorteners, File Converters) and more
• 5% referral commission
• Dedicated account managers and 24/7 live chat
• Simple and flexible API integration

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