Panama's Bells and Whistles

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October 5th, 2007 by Nick

Panama was launched in the UK mid 2007 it entered the paid search marketing landscape with little more than a sigh. Yahoo said that their new platform would revolutionise paid search marketing, and includes many new applications and tools that will make Yahoo more user friendly and therefore a strong contender. Instead some have found the platform clunky and the import system difficult.

The new platform is a vast improvement on the old Yahoo Search Marketing interface and processes; however, they are not showing us anything new. They have reproduced a lot of the same applications and tools as another well known search engine, but just not as well.

One of the main features is that the set up has been completely flattened out. Yahoo says that this is more rational and flexible, granted you no longer have to set the date limits every time you change a page on the interface but you still can not view positions from an ad group level? Yahoo, as mentioned earlier, has added in some helpful tools for managing your campaigns effectively, Campaign level has tools such as daily spend limit, monthly budget, scheduling. The optimisation setting allows you to show the better performing ads more often, tactic settings allow you to set the match type and cost per clicks for ad groups and keywords, and geo-targeting. Any of this sounding familiar?

Ad Group level settings are much the same but include a watch list flag, the best I can make form this is it allows you to quickly look up ad groups and keywords that you feel need attention like for example if they are particularly competitive or business critical. Keyword level, editorial status, marketplace bid, custom landing URL, alternate text, tactic settings, watch list flag. Ad level, show, long description, landing URL, display URL and editorial status.

Granted the editorial process is faster than it used to be, but the editorial team will take it upon themselves to delete keywords that they deem to have insufficient related webpage content or low quality score, so keep your bids high.

Panama is a vast improvement on the overture interface it runs smoothly and it has all of the things that you need toolswise to make a good user friendly platform, but for Yahoo to surpass Google or even come close to being a strong competitor it needs to be inventive to ensure that they are always churning out new ideas. Google registered thousands of patents last year, many of which will never even be in the blogoshpere never mind the public eye but they are always thinking, and therefore, leaving Yahoo to play catch up.

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