December 12, 2006

Today, Yahoo is pushing its Panama search marketing platform to new US advertisers, two months after its first beta release to other Internet marketers.

Yahoo's slow rollout seems to be taking off. The company was able to develop its campaign management platform with constant feedback from early adopters.

John Slade, Yahoo's senior director of product management says "Yahoo has been responsive to suggestions on how to improve the transformative upgrade".

Slade added "there were some people that wanted to get in and start using the new features right away. Others may have business reasons to wait." He added "different customers have different comfort levels. But now we're ready to open it up to the masses."

Yahoo will add even more features into the first quarter of 2007, but Slade said the company is satisfied that it will be able to be responsive to the needs of a large group of advertisers migrating to the new platform.

Yahoo first presented Panama in August at SES-San Jose. It then began a limited launch of the platform two months ago.

In late January or early February, Yahoo will turn on its new SEM ranking algorithm, which takes into account more factors than simply bid price to determine ad ranking, as Google does with its Quality Score concept.

Then Yahoo will roll out its new Panama platform to advertisers outside of the U.S.

One of the big underlying ideas of Panama is a desire to greatly simplify the platform for new users, while retaining and building up advanced features for more experienced users, Slade said.

To that end, Yahoo has made initial sign-up a five-step process, which only asks advertisers for minimal details to get a campaign up and running rapidly.

"Yahoo isn't asking search marketers to learn to use all the bells and whistles for the first time. Testing has shown that users aren't interested in learning the full complexity right away," Slade said.

New users can get started quickly by providing regional targeting preferences, desired keywords, campaign budget, and ad copy for their first ad. Then the advertiser only needs to supply a credit card to launch the campaign. On subsequent log-ins, users will be presented with the more advanced features.

Yahoo also streamlined its ad activation process, to get new ads online shortly after they are submitted, in most cases. Editorial guidelines will be maintained, Slade said, especially in certain sensitive categories.

The keyword selection algorithms are new to Panama, with collaborative filtering to recommend more relevant keywords, tailored to the campaign's budget.

Yahoo's new Panama platform is designed to prevent advertisers who set a low budget from bidding on popular keywords that will be too expensive to be effective within that budget, Slade said. Tools that highlight the interactions between keywords, bid prices, and daily budgets are available, but not highlighted to first-time users.

"In tests conducted by Yahoo, when we included those capabilities, users found it complicated and overwhelming," he said.

Another marketer-friendly move highlighted by Panama is to attempt to speak their language, instead of requiring marketers to learn to speak like a search engine, Slade said. Yahoo has also included ad testing capabilities, which allow for randomized tests of multiple messages and targeting values, or optimized testing that gives better-performing ads more exposure.

Panama will offer an extensive library of help content and tutorials, available in an Upgrade Center on its site.

Source: Click Z