First things first: The image verification is gone.
Please excuse me while I get up and do a little Ocho Cinco merengue around my cube.
I’m just starting to get into the account and play around with the interface. It doesn’t look like Adwords and it doesn’t look like Adcenter. It has it’s own look and feel, and is somewhat confusing at first glance but as you spend time with it, there are some interesting features.
First impressions?
Logging into the main dashboard I’m presented with the following modules: Alerts, Performance/Account Summary, and a list of the top campaigns. The design is bland, so from a GUI perspective, functional but underwhelming. I’ll give them a pass on this for now. I’m more interested in what’s under the hood.
If I select one of my campaigns from the dashboard I’m taken to the campaign overview page. From here I can do everything I need to, which is quickly generate graphs that show my clicks, impressions, and cost over the last 7 days. I can edit the campaign settings, or create an adgroup. Or, I can drill down into an existing adgroup. All basic functions, easily accessible, it just takes the eyes a few minutes to adjust to the ‘different’ layout. The campaign settings button is a drop down that offers:
Tactic Settings - choose content match, sponsored search, and match type
GeoTargeting - choose geo targeting, or specific region (city targeting or state/province). there are some adwordesque features here with maps and such, but I couldn’t get them to work at the time of this review.
Delete
At the adgroup level Panama starts to get a little more interesting. At the top you see your ad creative with a quick overview of it’s performance.
Display Rate (%): 100.0 CTR (%): 5.32 Clicks: 8 Quality Index: (*bar*)
We also have the defacto keyword list with the current bids and status and performance numbers you would expect to see. Continue drilling down to the keyword level and what do we have?
Slider bars!

I’m a fool for fancy graphics with slider bars. I can move the slider across the graph and it immediately displays the:
estimated monthly clicks
estimated average position
estimated share of available clicks —Pay attention to this
What will be interesting to see is how accurate these estimates are. We know how challenged Adwords has been with this regard. My first instinct is that this may be too much information to share with advertisers. As much as we curse google for not sharing the secret recipe behind everything, there’s a purpose to it. We’ll see if this feature stays for the long term, and I’ll use the hell out of it while it’s here.
Overall, I’m intrigued with the updates and I look forward to getting to know the system better than I do now. I see potential, and think Yahoo, at the very minimum, has gone a long ways towards getting back in the game.
I’ll try to look into the features with more detail, including reporting, in the coming weeks.