Panama Review

Panama – The New Yahoo! Search

Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly Overture, has been rolling out their new ad system upgrade, dubbed Panama. Here are some initial impressions.

When you first login to Panama you are directed to a dashboard page and your eyes are immediately drawn to the top of right of the page where there is a box for your alerts. The alerts are in bold and have the date of the alert. The alerts are broken out into 4 categories; Billing and Payment, Editorial, Campaign, and Opportunity. Other than my credit card being charged, I have yet to see any other alerts pop up, and I am interested in what the Opportunity Alert will show. Also at the top part of the page there is a simple line graph that shows activity for the last week, the default is impressions, but costs, revenue, clicks and conversions are also options.

At the bottom of the page is a layout similar to Google AdWords in that the campaigns are broken down in your standard categories, allowing you to sort by what column is most relevant to you. One great feature is that the sort is done on the same page, the page does not refresh, which makes the process much faster. Not only can you look at the account on the campaign level, but also you can view top keywords, adgroups and watched campaigns (more on this in another post).

Similar to AdWords, when you click on a campaign your are taken to the ad group page that offers a similar layout to AdWords, when you want to adjust bids you can click on one link that highlights all of the keywords. When you get to the Set Keyword Bids page, the interface has one big flaw, it takes an extra click to see what the first and last bids are. There is also no information on what your average position is on the Set Keyword Bids page which makes optimizing more than a couple keywords at a time difficult. To get that info you have to go back to the Adgroups details page.

Overall, at first glance, Panama is a big improvement, but to me it still feels like they are trying to play catchup to AdWords, vs. offering new and unique tools to try to take ad revenue from Google. Keep checking back for a more detailed analysis.