Will Yahoo's Project Panama stand as an AdWords rival?

20. March 2007

Launched on February, the 5th, the "Project Panama" seemed to be really successfull. Behind this military style project name, a software upgrade for the search advertising results in Yahoo! Search Marketing (former Overture) is hiding .

Yahoo, as Google or MSN LiveSearch, have implemented their Search Marketing advertising on the result pages years ago. As an example, when searching for “Business Development” using Google, you will see the organic or natural search results (the ranking is done by google's software and can not be influenced by paying for it), looking at the right part of your screen - will see "sponsored links" in a slightly different format: Pay Per Click advertising. The advertiser will enter for which search terms they want their advert to appear and how much they are willing to pay for this.

Project Panama is a significant upgrade in Yahoo!'s search algorithm, to increase the possiblity of a perfect match - placing an advert offering the right product to the right customer at the right time!
Yahoo! is hoping for two direct consequences: more advertisers will post their adverts on Yahoo!'s search engine and web searchers will trust more in the sponsored links - and in simple words more traffic ~meaning~ more money for Yahoo!

Are the results as positive as expected? It does look like it at the moment. Click-through rates for Yahoo search advertising increased by 5 and 9 percent during the first two weeks (11^th & 18^th February 2007) when the company began delivering ads using the Panama technology (according to a report issued by comScore Networks). Will this dethrone AdWord (Googles solution) market domination?

Contact Anja on +44 (0)20 8144 6655 for more information how to use Search Engine Marketing and Pay Per Click campaigns for your companies website.

Article by Guillaume Rembert @ Tetridia

Tetri-Blog

Will Yahoo's Project Panama stand as an AdWords rival?

Tetridia Content Management

Link Partner