Is CJ giving traffic data to Alexa?

[skippy]

Has any one see this before? For a search marketing campaign I am running I set up a new fake sub domain in CJ. I listed it as ad.example.com just for my own tracking. It does not exist. But the root domain is active. So I go to Alexa to give it a check and I see this in the traffic section.

Where do people go on example.com?
* example.com ~ 98%
* ad.example.com ~ 2%

ad.example.com is not in the links and the only place I can figure Alexa is getting this information is directly from CJ. Maybe someone else can figure out where Alexa is pulling this information but I can’t.

I am not too crazy about the idea of CJ hawking my traffic information. I looked and could not find anything that looks like a TOS in CJ. Does anybody know if we gave CJ permission to give traffic data to another site when we signed up?

[iblaine]

I'm sure Alexa found those pages on its own. It's unreasonable and extremely unlikely that CJ or any other affiliate network is feeding Alexa data on where to send their spider.

One thing CJ does do is spider their affiliates. If you generate a click or sale then the spider will visit that page. If you set up a new PID then the spider will visit that page. They do this to find fraudulent pubs like those that incentivize sales with porn.

[skippy]

Sure but there is nothing for Alexa to find. The links are for search engine marketing so they only run in Adwords. The sub domain does not exist and link is a standard CJ link. Like this

[qksrv.net...] Merchant.com%2Fshowpage.asp%3Fi%3Dmancat%26manufid%3D13&sid=foo

Even if Alexa is spidering google serps I don’t see how Alexa can read my domain in it.

[dataguy]

Do you have Alexa's toolbar installed? Have you ever typed 'ad.example.com' in your browsers address bar?

That's all you need to do and Alexa will consider that there is traffic at that address...

[skippy]

No I have never installed the Alexa toolbar. I am just very confused how Alexa can have this information. The only source that I can figure out is CJ.

But I agree with iblaine that that would be unlikely.

[dataguy]

I would say that it's more likely that someone at CJ has the Alexa toolbar installed and they checked out your link once.

[skippy]

Wow what a very good answer. That is probably it. Confused the hell out of me. Thanks