Nov
Does Panama Rock? – Part 1
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.
Does Panama allow you to load words like Google and MSN or do you still have to load them the old Yahoo way?
Good question. There are some improvements I think, and a lot of the same old. There’s an import tab under the adgroup navigation. On this screen there are 2 options:
1. Import Campaign – This is where you can import a campaign template (you could do this before, but it’s easier now I believe)
2. Convert 3rd Party campaign – This is exactly what it sounds like. (this is a new feature)
At the ad group level you can add up to 50 keywords at a time, which is going to be dissapointing to many people. I think this is what you mean when you say ‘the old yahoo way’. Right?
What do you think? Promising? Dissapointing?
When I said “old way”, I meant you load it to an excel file and they decide if words are relevant. Where as in Google and MSN you can load what ever words you want without them editing it.