Yahoo Releases New SEM Platform

At this year’s Las Vegas PubCon, Yahoo! unveiled its new “Panama” search marketing platform. Project Panama will become Yahoo's mainstay sponsored search product. Panama promises advertisers a much more relevant and strategic use of their ads.
WebProNews had a quick chat with Mona Elesseily at PubCon on what's new in Panama. Check it out here on my videos and interviews page.

But will it be a positive step for yahoo Search marketers?The Yahoo Search Marketing blog gives me mixed feelings, from my point of view they are trying to simulate Google by removing the "Top 5 Max Bids," "Position" and "Your Cost" columns from the current account interface. This means your now flying in the dark - just the way Google is harvesting it's money trees. So basically you're now bidding more because you can no longer see the top bid prices.

For Yahoo, this means Search Engine Marketers will now probably over bid to ensure they are higher than their competitors, meaning more revenue increases more often!

Now, you'll see two new columns on the Sponsored Search Manage Bids page: 1. Estimated Average Position. This column provides an estimate of the average position in which your ad may be displayed on the results page, based on your max bid and the bids of other advertisers.
2. Bid Range for Top Positions. This column displays the bids for the positions at the top of the search results page for each of your keywords.