Yesterday I submitted our Yahoo Search Marketing account to the early transition process to the “Panama” ad platform. Who knows how long we will be waiting for the official “green light” from the transition team to start preparing to be moved, but hopefully it will be soon.

I was kind of happy and kind of sad to see that Search Optimizer is going the way of the dinosaurs, since we have been using it since early beta. But at the same time, it never really seemed to work perfectly, and hopefully Panama will work better for us.

If you are planning on making the move to the Panama platform early, be warned that there are some things you will have to do, like download your account, before you are switched over. Seems a bit lame that Yahoo would make its advertisers do extra work to make the transition, but I know it is a very different ad platform (YAY!) and hopefully it will be worth it in the end. Get more info on making the transition here (PDF).

Yahoo Search Marketing has started up a blog — which is starting out pretty impersonal and corporate - but it is a good step forward. Hopefully they can do as well as the Inside AdWords Blog.

It is my intention to keep you all updated on how the transition goes. Hopefully it will be painless, but if there is pain we will try to help you avoid it.

Happy November!