Adword Management Partner Blocking Referrer

[cgrant]

We have a client using Yellowbook to manage their adword campaigns. After setting up GA for them, we're not seeing adwords campaign referrers or yellowbooklead.com referrals (the domain the clicks are visibly routing through from the SERP). Is there potentially a redirect in place blocking the referer? Are they going into 'Direct Visits' in GA?

Anyone else familiar with this management method? I'm guessing they do this to force you to use their analytics package?

[cgrantski]

Have you tried using Fiddler or HTTPWatch or any of the other tools to see what exactly is happening? It may be less sinister than what you are suspecting. These commercial outfits are set up in complicated ways. Anybody doing analytics should be familiar with the Fiddler-like tools. And when doing any pay-per-click campaign, the referrer is a useless way to go in analytics (analytics generic, not just Google Analytics). The destination URLs themselves need to have marker parameters in them.