Today i checked my stats and noticed a new affiliate started promoting my product (bob). i said myself "Great".....that affiliate has gotten me 680 hops since this morning, so i was curious about what website he owned to send this much traffic. so i went in my google analytics and checked for # of pageviews for ?hop=bob (i do that to check the pageviews' visit source)....However google analytics tells me no visitor have visited ?hop=bob.... Whats happening? its not about my stats not updating, they update every 2-3 hours and yet it still doesnt detect any views for ?hop=bob...Yet my clickbank stats clearly state bob got me 680 hops.
while Google Analytics is nice it pays to have your own traffic logging system (having complete web-server logs)
I don't do to much analytics now as I have everything running and optimized. You may want to look into a php based solution. I used to have a good one called phptraffic or something. It's open source and useful if you don't have access to server logs. If you do have access to server logs than you could install a program that would analyze them for you (been a while since I've done that). There is a simple explanation how he's getting around not showing his hop info to you. He could send it to a php page which sends an empty referrer header. He could be using an <img> tag to set his hoplink. There's probably a couple others but it's late and my brain isn't working.