I’ve started using the new Yahoo Search Marketing Platform (Panama) for SouthEast Asiafor about 1 and a half week now. So i want to share with you all some of my experiences with the new platform.
For those of you who are short in time, my recommendation at this point is you definitely should give Panama a chance. Unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of my working position i can’t reveal too much about why you should get on to Yahoo Panama fast.
However, if you trust me enough and get on to it, i also want to let you know in advance a few things you should watch out for:
- Only “Standard Match” or “Exact Match” is available at the moment. What it means is that advertisers’ ad will only appear if users type in the exact search query as one of your keywords.
- Keyword generation tool doesn’t work right now. The same with Traffic Estimation.
- Time zone is US time zone so you may have trouble with the reporting system because of the time difference.
- Only USD is acceptable at the moment, which means advertisers pay for clicks in USD. No local currency is accepted.
- Yahoo Panama is based on IP targeting, which means advertisers will choose which region they want to show their ads and Yahoo will base on the IP address of searchers to decide where they are from. Google also uses IP targeting. However, the difference between Yahoo and Google is that for Yahoo, no matter whether you are on Yahoo.com or yahoo.com.sg or yahoo.com.my etc…, as long as you are in Singapore, you will see the ads targeted to Singapore.
For Google, when you type in google.com, Google will automatically direct you to your country domain. Hence if you are in Singapore, but type in the browser www.google.com.my, you will see ads that target people from Malaysia.
Another small issue with IP targeting is that a small percentage of IP addresses of searchers are incorrect so technically your target audience is not 100% correct geographically.
- There are still no Offline software like Adwords Editor but for Yahoo Panama yet. The same for My Client Center
Despite all of the above, i Still strongly recommend you start experimenting on Yahoo Panama early. Some of the so called issues above may get fixed sooner than you think. More importantly, if you are very Return on Investment like many of my clients, you definitely should try Panama out. You will have a nice surprise!
That’s all that i can say at the moment unfortunately due to my sensitive working position.
Have a great Sunday Evening,
Chandler