What Panama means for PPC advertisers

Filed in PPC Advertising, Yahoo by Matt McGee on October 21, 2006

Yahoo logoDavid White shares a good, basic explanation of what Yahoo’s new “Panama” PPC platform means for PPC advertisers and the PPC marketplace in general:

MediaPost: Opaque vs. Open (reg. req’d)

The “open” marketplace is what Yahoo has been running up until now, where ad placement was based solely on your bid and you could see all your competitor’s bids up front. The “opaque” marketplace is different:

Opaque marketplaces, as seen today on Google and Microsoft’s adCenter, stand in sharp contrast. They are defined by two key characteristics:

1. Ads are ranked based on both the bid price and the click-through rate (CTR). Google’s quality score extends this concept even further by including the quality of an advertiser’s landing pages and ad copy when calculating an ad’s rank.

2. Advertisers cannot see the CTR, bid or quality score for competitors.

These characteristics add complexity and present new challenges when compared to an open marketplace.

I think this is a helpful article for small business owners who have experience with the old Yahoo system and may not fully understand the changes that are coming with the new Panama platform.

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