From Amr Awadallah, a Yahoo fellow, but one worth listenting to.
Some background, Panama brings two core changes:
One launched a few months ago and that is the new advertiser facing UI (user interface), it is much faster and easier to use than the original Overture UI (which was not upgraded in years) and brings many new features like ad templates, creative testing, immediate ad activation, and geo-targeting.
The other core change is what Yahoo! will launch late evening on Monday Feb 5th, and that is the spanken new Quality-Ordering marketplace. In a nut-shell, Yahoo!’s current marketplace orders the sponsored results by how much the advertisers are bidding regardless of how relevant the ad is to the query the user issues, the new marketplace will focus more on the relevance of the ad and how it relates to the query.
Quality-Ordering (aka Quality Reordering) is a win-win-win, i.e. it is a win for the users since they get more relevant sponsored results, it is a win for advertisers since they get leads that are more likely to convert (so higher ROI), and it is a win for Yahoo! since higher quality equals more clicks.
Google has offered all these features for “years”. Is Yahoo! bringing anything new to the table with Panama?
Google has the bid timer; your ads/links will only show at times specified. They also added some fancy reporting. Yahoo’s new unique feature (I have not seen it in my Google account) is the Estimated Clicks Per Bid which makes sure you are getting a better ROI.
But who cares about this stuff(no one)? Battelle’s blog is supposed to be at a higher level discussions than just discussing the UI of your PPC account.
Panama is about RPS and winning parternships. That’s what we should speculate about.
I got a call from Yahoo! yesterday (I run several sites for a living and use both AdSense and AdWords). If I open a new account to advertise with Yahoo!, they are going to put $70 worth of credit into it if I spend $30. Too good to pass up. Has anyone else heard of this?