I don’t know whether to jump for joy or drop to a slump with this system upgrade. For those of you who don’t know, “Panama”, launched Feb 5 in the U.S. and is Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest system upgrade for all their search advertisers. Yahoo’s previous (or existing - if you are outside of the U.S.) system is quite ancient compared to Google’s and doesn’t offer nearly as much functionalities or flexibility. For us in Asia, Japan looks to be one of the first countries to upgrade (we are not running Yahoo campaign for all the Asian countries so I am not 100% sure if they are the first) with a planned launch date in April. I even received a shiny promo newsletter from Overture Japan (Yahoo hasn’t renamed Overture to Yahoo Search Marketing in Japan yet) the other day which unfortunately I could not read since it was in Japanese. Hopefully the upgraded system will help our campaigns perform better in terms of conversions as right now not many things in the Yahoo campaigns can be tweaked to yield best ROI. The scary thing about this upgrade for us is, we have campaigns that are extremely large! A typical campaign can have multiple thousand of keywords in both English and Japanese. This can potentially make migrating to a new system architecture nightmarish for us. Let’s cross our fingers and hope the transition will be as painless as possible. Now if our tech guys in Germany can tap into the new Yahoo API quickly and get us started with some of those sweet automated bidding…