Yahoo Reveals Its New Ad Platform, Panama, at SES

Reports around the web are that Yahoo Search Marketing has unveiled its new platform codenamed Panama at the SES conference in San Jose. Yahoo hasn’t done any major upgrades since the acquisition of GoTo.com and has been using basically the same auction style bidding strategy since its inception. The higher you bid the higher your position, pretty simple stuff, but with Panama Yahoo plans to implement a more algorithmic style of bidding including factors like quality score and ROI. Sound familar? Well it should, it is a similar setup that Google and MSN use
which allows them to control the price of keywords (although they would never admit it).

One of the benefits of this new platform is the ability to target a variety of different channels. Yahoo isn’t only a search engine. It has a variety of sites and portals from Yahoo Trips to Yahoo Games and advertisers will be able to target each section. Also along the lines of better targeting, Yahoo says geo-targeting will be easier then ever with Panama. This much needed change was expected to be released by Q3 but Yahoo has stated numerous times that it will be available Q4.

Since I was not at SES to gather more info, I will point you to Search Engine Journal, who has a more indepth review complete with a few almost readable screenshots.