Tracking PPC Campaigns - a problem!

[sabbath180]

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I'm using Google's URL builder tool to track my non-Google PPC campaigns in Google Analytics. So, I would append something like ?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc etc to the end of each URL. This works great.

The problem I have is that if someone clicks through an affiliate link on my landing page this data is passed on to the merchant, and shows up as my referring URL if a sale is then made. I really don't want the merchants to be able to see what keywords I'm using and which work (I'm not using anything I shouldn't, it's just why should I do their keyword research for free?).

Can anyone advise how I can stop this happening? If I use a filter in GA or using mod_rewrite to strip the query string, will that then make it useless?

[molecule]

Chucking a random idea out there - how about if you had a database of keywords, then a hash of each keyword. You could then put that hash in the URL, and somehow compare in the database. Sounds a bit too complex tho...

[carleisenstein]

A bit messy, but you could send your traffic out through a redirect. So your outbound links point to to yourdomain.com/yourredirectpage?target=merchantsurl and then yourredirectpage will META refresh to the merchantsurl. That would mean the parameters won't get passed - all merchants would see is yourdomain.com/yourredirectpage.

However to be honest I don't think most merchants have the time or energy to go through all of their affiliates referring URLs and work out what keywords they're using and then try them themselves.