Yahoo's Panama ad system been talked about a lot lately, mostly by people (like Wall St. Analysts and Terry Semel) who've never used it.

I've been using it for a month, and from a usability standpoint it's not that great. Overall, I give it a C+. Considering the long gestation period, I thought it would have been better.

Google AdWords has refined its workflow and is very fast and easy. Plus I'm used to Google. I wish Yahoo had made Panama work EXACTLY like Google. They should have copied it more carefully.

Anyways, I sent a list of usability annoyances to Yahoo's feedback email address. Someday I'll write a detailed post on my experiences with Panama, but this punchlist gives you an idea of how Panama usability feels incomplete...

• Emailable reports missing! MUST HAVE! Need automatic daily runs of reports emailed to me in CSV format!
• Can't put a keyword substitution in the destination URL. This is limiting for tracking conversion. Hard to send subid's directly to affiliate networks. Yahoo does have automatic keyword insertion, but the parameter names aren't changeable.
• It's hard to find things. QUICK - how do you change your campaign daily spend limit? Not easy to find. Shouldn't that be under "Campaign Settings" at least?
• Editorial Emails - I get a lot of emails with editorial updates, but they don't list the affected camapaign / ad group / ad / keyword. They should tell you what keywords / ads are declined, etc.
• Need to be able to set up a backup credit card.
• No easy URL to login - both marketingsolutions.yahoo.com / searchmarketing.yahoo.com are TOO LONG.
• REBRAND PANAMA - see here
• Session timeout is too short. Logs you out automatically too fast.
• Timed out session shouldn't refresh to login page automatically - sometimes you just need to see the data on the last page you were on, and don't need to interact with it.
• System doesn't log you in automatically. See Google. No need to type in account / passwd on Google.
• Dashboard page: Date selection is harder than just having a pulldown of choices: "Today, Yesterday, This week, etc." See Google for example.
• Calendar picker for start - end date is confusing, hard to use. Much easier would be a standard MM/DD/YY - MM/DD/YY set of pulldowns. See Google for example.
• Dashboard page doesn't display totals for all campaigns - so you can't see at a glance what you spent.
• Dashboard page: can't make old alerts go away.
• No feedback button anywhere to be found. Hard to send feedback when using!
• Create campaign button on upper right is odd location, should also be on left side, in line with Campaigns list.
• In Creating a campaign wizard - you should be able to click on any of the steps in the process - there's a visible bread crumb trail, but it's not clickable.
• It'd be nice if email came from fewer mail addresses. I get email from at least the following:
  • mailserver@overture.com
  • customersolutions--ysm@cc.yahoo-inc.com
  • solutions@ysm.yahoo-email.com

Labels: feedback, panama, yahoo

¶ 1/25/2007