For months now, Yahoo! Search Marketing has been sending emails to salivating search engine marketers explaining all the new, sexy, features YSM will have in Q3 and Q4, while painting a bright, targeted and usable future for YSM advertisers.
Pull out your khakis and hiking boots, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Panama platform has gone live! Although the thoughts of new targeting and scheduling features are always exciting, this brings up another question. What’s the learning curve? Will all these new and potentially useful features help leverage online shopping to its full potential for the holiday season? Or will these functions confuse advertisers during the holiday season and become a stumbling block to the already familiar platform until the primetime season is over?
Either way, once an advertiser has signed up, and made the transition, there is no turning back. Many of the features may already be familiar to Google AdWords users, since they seem to be modeled from the system. In this new and unexplored juggle, wearing a Panama hat, there will be bugs. Oh yes, there will always be bugs. Once adapted and glitch-free, this change should help advertisers more easily navigate and aim at their targets in the search jungle. In my opinion, the biggest and best change is geo-targeting within already existing accounts. Yahoo is switching from a shotgun spray in a herd approach, to a sharp shooting sniper's bullet at individual targets.
Here is a brief list comparing more of the the old system's features with the new.
*Nifty YSM hat/logo graphic created by me. 