I've just got into a web design and development business and before i started it i already thought that online advertising was not a good idea since i only want to target customers that was local to my area only and i am decided to look for customers than customer look for me (opposite to Chuck Norris style). But since godaddy has a free adwords and facebook coupon and my business was not yet fully operational so i give it a try. So here's what i do. I set my campaign to appear on search only, use high importance keywords together with countries or my city or my neighboring cities mixed with other not so related keywords to my business just for experimentation. And what i have observed at click patterns from my google adwords campaign was it looks like coming from my competitors. almost the same click for keywords everyday with not so high impressions compared to other keywords with high impressions but have little or no clicks. Am i just paranoid because i cannot afford it or some of you have the same suspicion? I tried to search here in forum for competitor clicks but got no answer. I am planning to offer managing google adwords advertising service so i wanna know. Thanks in advance.
Google have a highly sophisticated click-fraud detection system http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/03/about-invalid-clicks.html "There are many things we do to detect invalid clicks, including looking at duplicate IP addresses, user session information, network information, geo-targeting and browser information." it's unlikely a competitor can get through all that, and even if you see the clicks being recorded, it is likely that you are not being charged, if they are what you suspect, but are credited as invalid clicks. If you still have reasonable suspicions, you should get in touch with your Google account manager. p.s - if you didn't know this, you do not know enough to even begin to think about offering to manage other people's accounts. When you are not only charging a fee, but also playing around with other people's advertising budget, you need to know the system in depth
Clicking on competitors keywords happen on some scale, I think on all niches. But as magda says, Google has a pretty good click fraud detection system. Google will credit your account at a later date if they notice a number of fraudulent clicks (I have no idea how many)
I'd contact Google and give them a heads up on this anyway. Worst case scenario-you've wasted one phonecall