I missed this news, however I find it quite alarmingly underreported that Google AdWords Employees are allowed to own AdWords accounts.

The post where this is admitted is #19.

Here’s the start of the thread.

I would like to say that I think AdWords Advisor is great and it must be a herculean task to do his job.

However, toddb sums it up when he says:
” Wow! So you and I are playing poker but you get to see my cards. I am totally stunned. I had no idea.”

This would not be a big deal if we were talking about little sample testbed accounts that every AdWords employee used. With google’s available processing power they could probably even make it a virtual mirror of the real Adwords system. Instead, some Google employees are very involved in private AdWords accounts. As this post from bttmfeed indicates:

Seeing the same thing here. High ctr history and testing with an outrageous bid is not winning the affiliate auction. Tried everything. It’s almost as though a google employee is setting their own CTR history. Last time meeting with our merchant one of the other affiliates there was a Google employee, and an Adwords employee at that. How is it acceptable to have to compete with someone with insider knowledge that actually works with the system daily and can look at my account. IMHO, Google should really not be allowing this.

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That’s for sure! Shill bidding is the name for this practice, whether its intentional or not. Here’s Ebay’s definition of shill bidding.

Shill Bidding is bidding that artificially increases an item’s price or apparent desirability, or bidding by individuals with a level of access to the seller’s item information not available to the general Community.

The “item” in question is a high position on the sponsored listings ads or in the case of advertising as an affiliate, the only available ad position
for a specific keyword. Shill bidding from Google employees won’t harm the overall advertising experience significantly (too few employees, too much ad inventory) but you can bet that it is freezing out individual advertisers from keywords that used to provide them a good living. Even if Google’s “strict controls” on the process put a low limit on employees adwords budget, there’s going to be a Google employee out there absolutely cleaning up via their informational advantage over the competition.

I’m not outraged, this is a problem with every auction-based ad market on the internet, and the smaller the ad market the more damaging it can be. I have seen some really egregious practices of this sort in the wholesale industry. I’m amused because it’s proof that Google is really just making it up as they go along.