Panama, Yahoo’s long awaited upgrade to their search marketing program, is now open to any U.S. business. Previously, the program was only available to Yahoo’s existing search marketing customers that wanted to upgrade to the new platform.
Panama will bring much needed updates to help Yahoo compete more effectively with Google’s contextual advertising platform. Under Panama, ads will be served and ranked based on a variety of factors, such as click through rates, instead of just placing the highest bidded ads first. The result should be significantly higher revenue to Yahoo and its partners.
Yahoo released a statement about Panama, touting its easy five-step sign-up process. According to the release, “advertisers can quickly create campaigns, determine their desired position, understand their potential share of available clicks, set their budgets, and then see their ads online within minutes. In addition, Yahoo’s new ad testing and optimization features allow advertisers to easily test their creative options and manage their campaigns to the goals they have for return on investment.”
Yahoo will transition existing customers to Panama one market at a time. Once the U.S. has been completely transitioned, Yahoo will announce international roll-out plans.
