Is bid jamming permitted?

[Kobayashi]

Anyone know if the tatic of intentional bid jamming of another advertiser's ad is against the AdWords terms of service? When I inquired about it a couple years ago when it happend to me, I recall being told that someone is probably just testing the waters so to speak and to simply never set a max CPC higher than one is willing to pay. The last part of which is good advice of course but it did not answer my question.

[netmeg]

What exactly is bid jamming?

[Philosopher]

I assume you mean intentionally trying to make the advertiser above you pay the max and deplete their ad budget?

[Kobayashi]

yes although not necessarily with the intent to deplete their entire budget. Usually just enough to make the advertiser getting jammed to reconsider their bid strategy and then the bid jammer might shadow them downwards till a more realistic cpc is reached.

[arieng]

I've seen some advertisers go so far as to micromanage this as a part of their daily routine. They'd bump their bids until competitors would hit their daily budget then drop down to nothing. Was much easier in Overture back in the day, but still works. IMHO, it is more work than its worth except for a very few highly-competitive scenarios.

There's no way you could get in trouble for this. You're just changing your bids in an auction scenario. The fault lies with the competitor for over-bidding, not you for taking advantage of it.