The fruition of Yahoo’s Project Panama the name for their new paid search ad platform initiative, may at long last be revealed to the impatient advertising masses.
Link: Project Panama
In a SEMPO-hosted event, Yahoo demo’d the new ad platform via Webex to an eager audience of search marketing professionals. The event titled, an “Early Look at Yahoo! Search Marketing’s New Platform” was given by John Kim, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Yahoo! Search.
Mr. Kim revealed that the current paid search platform that Yahoo uses dates back to the days of GoTo.com (GoTo.com is the Internet’s first pay-per-click search engine which later became Overture and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003). Though the concept of paid search marketing was innovative back in 1999, when GoTo.com launched, the DirecTraffic Center (Yahoo’s current search ad platform) is clunky and cumbersome to use compared to Google and MSN.
Project Panama has been underway for two years, and Mr. Kim announced that it will be released to the public some time in Q4 2006. It was initially scheduled for release in Q3, so all bets are on at this point.
A few of the new features that we’re excited about include:
- The ability to assign multiple ads to one keyword (Yahoo calls keywords “targets” - because search marketing isn’t confusing enough). Google and MSN already do this, so it’ll be nice when this feature is live in Yahoo
- The ability to target by geographic region OR DMA - the DMA function is very cool and user friendly. It displays a map of the region you’re targeting and highlights the DMA regions as you select them
- A very interesting campaign forecasting feature which shows you (visually) how many clicks you can expect based on your maximum bid
- A campaign dashboard that’s very intuitive and somewhat customizable
The bottom line is that if you’ve used Google Adwords to any degree, Yahoo’s new search platform will not present many surprises. The good news for search marketers everywhere is that the ability to create ad groups in Yahoo will enable usto standardize our campaigns a lot more than we ever could before.
Mr. Kim assured all the nervous nellies on the call that campaign migration from the old platform to the new one should be painless.
Tag: Yahoo
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