Just so Adam doesn’t get in a tizzy when trying to log into his Yahoo Account this weekend, here is the email Yahoo sent out about their systems wide upgrade.

Dear Yahoo! Search Marketing Advertiser,

You will be unable to access your Yahoo! Search Marketing account for approximately six hours this coming weekend while we update our systems. The outage will begin at 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, March 2, and is scheduled to conclude at 2:00 a.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, March 3.

Please be aware that during an outage such as this, all advertiser accounts are frozen, and you will not be able to change bids, add or remove keywords, etc. Thus, if you have changes you need to make to your campaigns, please get them in place well before the beginning of the outage. Additionally, if your daily spending limit has been
reached prior to the systems update, your ads may remain offline for the duration of the outage.

Should there be any updates to the timing of this outage, a notice will be posted on the Dashboard page in your account.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to improve our service.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

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I have been putting off diving into the new Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) for a while now, mainly because my clients rank well in Yahoo. But mostly because I fear change. I have been working with the YSM console for over 3 years now and have become pretty familiar with the clunky interface and like any old dog that hangs around long enough you learn to love’em. Sure she shed, was unreliable and slow when fetching but I loved her transparency. I bid where I wanted to appear. There were no quality scores or unknown variables, just a straight, bid-to-position model. Oh how I miss those days.

Recently, I’ve started toying around with the pseudo-new Yahoo! interface and I feel like a blind man without my guide-dog. There are certain aspects I really can see myself liking and I can see how it would be extremely easy for a new person who has never started had a paid search account, in fact much easier than Google’s Adwords Starter Edition. But there are some aspects that leave me asking WTF were they thinking?

Now I could be completely wrong and just not have discovered the right answer but doing things like attempting to delete multiple campaigns at once is impossible. Instead I have to go into each campaign and manually deleted them one by one? Thats ridiculous. Also forcing an advanced user to walk through the 8+ steps needed to create a campaign is kind of annoying.

Needless to say, I will continue banging around and posting my thoughts and hopefully I’ll uncover a useful piece of info or two or at least find a new man’s best friend.

TopRankBlog has a good interview with the Senior Director of Yahoo Search Marketing, regarding the changes involved in the new platform dubbed Panama.

He covers topics such as the differences between Panama and Adwords, new campaign features, and the revamped signup process.

here is a little excerpt:

TRB: What can you do now to run a campaign that you couldn?t before?

Slade: With the new platform, advertisers will have access to many new capabilities for managing their campaigns.

• * Geo-Targeting ? Enables advertisers to display their ads broadly or to narrow their distribution down to specific metropolitan areas, allowing them to better target their customers, customize their ads and control their costs.
• * Ad Testing ? Allows advertisers to easily test multiple versions of their ads to determine the message that works best for their customers. They can also choose to let our systems automatically optimize serving to the ad that performs best on click-through rate.
• * Goal-Based Campaign Optimization ? If an advertiser has business metrics they?re trying to hit, such as a CPA, ROI or ROAS goal, our systems can automatically adjust their ad rotation and bids to help them meet those goals.
• * Campaign Budgeting and Scheduling ? Allows advertisers to create, budget and schedule individual advertising campaigns for greater control over their advertising strategy and spending. Advertisers also have the option to place an account and/ or campaign daily spending limit to increase budget control.

read more here

People new to Yahoo Search Marketing have the ability to check out Yahoo’s knew search marketing platform, codenamed Panama. Rueters is reporting that newcomers to YSM will be in the new Panama system as Yahoo is inviting customers to Panama in stages before its official launch in the first quarter of 2007.

Personally, I’m not in any hurry to switch to Panama. Yahoo, like MSN, does not drive enough traffic at the moment to justify the time needed to learn these new systems in the depth required to fully utilize them. And frankly, I like Yahoo’s current bid strategy, although I maybe the only one, but compared to the Google nonsense its a dream!