panama - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Yahoo! gave some cheer to fickle stock market investors after announcing better-than-expected third quarter figures last night.

The web company’s shares jumped 10% after it posted a 12% increase in revenues to $1.77bn and had some good news to report from both its search and display ad businesses.

Yahoo! has started testing its Panama contextual search advertising platform in the UK and will roll out the full service shortly.

The company last week invited search marketing professionals to a preview of the service, which seeks to improve return on advertising investment by better targeting ads to users.

Yahoo!'s new Panama advertising platform is showing some early signs of improved click-through rates, according to figures from SearchIgnite.

The search company reported that CTR had improved since the launch of the system, while cost per click had remained constant. Since Q406, average CTR on Yahoo! has risen from 2% to 2.5% among SearchIgnite's clients. 

Yahoo late last night flipped the switch on a new search marketing system it hopes will help it close the gap on sector leader Google.

Codenamed "Panama", the new model gives sponsored ads higher billing based on keyword matches to page content. In the old approach, ads were ordered only by which marketers bid most.

A new user interface and dashboard was already being tested by customers before Yahoo! yesterday launched what senior engineer Awa Awadallah called the "quality-ordering marketplace".