• John Battelle's Searchblog, Thursday, June 21, 2007 11:03 AM

On his Searchblog, John Battelle publishes the findings of Interpublic SEM firm Reprise in its early interactions with Yahoo's Panama search ad system. Overall, the search firm calls Panama "a significant upgrade over the previous Yahoo DTC (Direct Traffic Center) system, but it worries about the complex system's ability "to access the long tail of the market."

The Reprise study evaluates Panama's campaign management and performance, user interface and technology over a three-month period (January-March). In terms of SEM performance, the cost-per-click for keywords actually dropped 6.2% during a period where the average CPC for Google AdWords increased 2.8% and Microsoft's adCenter a whopping 9.6% -- a good thing for search marketers. The good news for Yahoo is that Reprise also found that its clickthrough rates went up dramatically, bringing [the CTR] in line with our average Google CTRs.

The bad news, however--and this usually proves to be the benchmark by which search marketers determine their spending--is that campaign conversions went down 5%, while conversion rates improved on both Google and MSN. That could mean the Panama's new quality ranking of sites has filtered out a few that used to convert at high levels. Reprise thinks Panama "does not yet address all of the requirements of the market," though it's a significant improvement.

Read the whole story at John Battelle's Searchblog »