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During the Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose conference, Yahoo! managed to generate interest for its new search ad platform- Project Panama.

Though still in development, Project Panama is aimed at increasing Yahoo! share in paid search advertising in which Google with its AdWords is still the largest player. MSN has also joined the race with its AdCenter test piloted in France way back in October ‘05.

According to John Kim- VP. Product Marketing, the new search ad platform has following features to attract ever growing base of online paid advertisers.

• New ad platform is more marketing focused to get the most out of the ad campaign.
• New Interface allows for selecting ads targets, ad creatives and call-to-action features such as coupons and phone calls to give an edge.
• Better targeted ads then ever before. This should get in more advertisers if Yahoo! plays it well.
• Better keyword selection tool combined with collaborative filtering will offer most suitable keywords.
• Scale to show number of clicks a bid will receive along with esimated average ad position. This is going to be very handy as knowing the number of clicks and avarage ad position before hand (read before make the ad live) will help generate better ROI for their search ad campaigns.
• Being able to run A/B ad testing and auto-selection of best performing ads. Thank you!
• Ability to set-up “Alerts” such as  “Are new competitors entering the space?” or, “Is the campaign underperforming by 5 percent?”. Also interestingly advertisers will be able to receive alerts when their account is near exhaustion or when their credit card is about to expire.
• New Ranking model in which not only the rankings will be dependent on the bids, it will also be denepding on number of clicks an ad is receiving. It is interesting to note that Yahoo! initially ranked paid ads based on the bid amount; higher the bid amount, higher will be your ads position. Also this is in line with Google’s ranking algorothm.
• Third party tools will be able to work with the new ad platform.

According to Forbes fully functional ad platform roll-out in US and Japan will be in late 2006 or early 2007. Till then we hope to hear more updates from Yahoo!’s camp.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 2:47 am and is filed under SEO Buzz, SEO Cheers. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.