Crypto ad networks are sold on reach, and reach is the least reliable thing about them. Inventory is resold between networks, traffic estimates are quoted from figures collected once and never rechecked, and the same placement often appears in three different media kits at three different prices.
These seven checks separate a network worth testing from one that will spend your budget on traffic nobody can account for.
1. Ask what the inventory actually is
Three kinds of inventory get sold as one. Direct placements on named sites are the most accountable: you know where the banner runs and can look at it. Programmatic inventory is a pool you cannot enumerate. Resold inventory is another network’s supply with a margin added.
Ask which of the three you are buying, and ask for the named sites. A network that will not name its top placements is selling the pool, whatever the deck says.
2. Check the traffic yourself, with a date
Take the sites the network names and check them in an independent traffic tool. Figures in media kits decay badly, and explorer and media traffic in crypto moves with the market, so a number from eighteen months ago can be several times the current reality.
Our own explorer inventory, checked against Similarweb in August 2026, sits at roughly 3.9 million monthly visits for Solscan, 3.4 million for Etherscan, 2.3 million for BscScan, 918,000 for Basescan and 759,000 for Polygonscan. Those same properties were being quoted three to four times higher from a December 2024 collection, which is exactly the decay pattern to expect from any deck that carries no date.
3. Establish who the audience is, not how many
An explorer visitor is a person with a wallet, mid-task, checking a transaction. A crypto news reader may hold nothing. A gaming portal audience overlaps with crypto only partly. These are different products sold at similar prices.
Match the surface to the action you want. Asking for a wallet connection makes sense next to a block explorer and very little sense beside an article someone is reading on a phone during a commute.
4. Find out what targeting is real
Networks advertise segments generously. Ask how each one is determined: contextual placement by site category is honest and limited, on-chain segmentation depends on what the network can actually observe, and declared interest data is frequently inherited from a third party and unverifiable.
The follow-up question is whether you can see performance split by segment. A network that reports only totals is one where the targeting cannot be checked. What genuine on-chain targeting involves is in how to set up wallet-based targeting.
5. Ask how they handle invalid traffic
Every network has some. The ones worth using can describe their filtering, will show you traffic rejected before billing, and have a stated position on what happens when you find fraud after the fact.
Get the refund or credit policy in writing before the first campaign. It is a straightforward conversation before spend and an unwinnable one afterwards.
6. Check what you can see while it runs
You need placement-level reporting, the ability to exclude a site mid-campaign, and enough frequency data to know whether you are reaching new people or the same ones repeatedly.
A dashboard showing impressions and clicks in aggregate is not enough to optimise anything. If you cannot see which placement produced which result, the campaign has one lever, which is stopping it.
7. Test small before committing
Run the smallest campaign the network will accept, against a conversion event you defined, with your own tracking rather than theirs. Compare their reported clicks against your recorded sessions.
A large gap between the two is the single most informative number in this entire process, and it is available for the cost of a test. Networks quoting attractive rates and reporting far more clicks than your analytics ever sees are common enough that the check should be routine.
Crypto-native or mainstream
Crypto-native networks and explorers accept creative that mainstream platforms reject, and they reach people who already hold assets. Mainstream platforms reach far more people, apply financial promotion rules unevenly, and can restrict an account rather than refuse a single advertisement.
Most launches use both: crypto-native for the audience that can act immediately, mainstream retargeting to recover visitors who left. What passes moderation is covered in how to get crypto ads approved on mainstream networks, and the budget split in how to split a launch budget across channels.
Our own screened placements, the current traffic figures behind them and how campaigns are reported are on our crypto traffic acquisition page.