Yesterday we had the chance to preview what our Yahoo! Search Marketing account looks like on the new “Panama” ad platform…and it was bad. In truth, the switch from the old Direct Traffic Center (DTC - the old Yahoo! ad platform) to the new Panama platform will basically render our account unusable.

Why? It all comes down to AdGroups.

But first a little background. The Yahoo! DTC had two levels of organization for their accounts - the campaign level and the keyword level. This was imperfect at best, since most advertisers ended up with a few thousand keywords in a single campaign. Yahoo! recognized that this was a problem and designed the new Panama interface with three levels of organization - campaign, keyword and AdGroup. If this sounds like Google AdWords, it should, since Yahoo! basically copied AdWords when designing much of Panama.

I think most advertisers would tell you that having another layer of organization in their Yahoo! account is a good thing…but going from the old DTC setup to the new Panama setup brought up a huge issue - who do you assign advertiser’s keywords into AdGroups when they move over to the Panama platform?

I don’t think there could have been a simple answer to this…but the solution that Yahoo! devised was, well, imperfect at best. In the end, Yahoo! decided that any keywords in your campaigns with similar advertisements would be grouped together into an AdGroup. Not a bad solution, except for the fact that many Yahoo! PPC advertisers have been writing custom ads for many of their keywords (a best practice for Yahoo!) - which means that every keyword might very well end up in an AdGroup of its own. And that, my friends, would pretty much stink.

And stink it does. Upon hitting the preview button to see what our Yahoo account would look like, we realized that our campaigns had hundreds of AdGroups under them. For example, we had a health insurance related campaign with 1,050 AdGroups in it…and those AdGroups were packed full of unrelated keywords. So basically, our Yahoo! account has become a giant, fat and ugly mess.

After a lot of nervous laughter from our Paid Search team, we started to strategize to see how we could fix the account. After much discussion we realized that taking our account as it was and getting it back into shape would likely take weeks of tedious work. This is not acceptable in my book.

In effect, Yahoo!’s Panama switchover has turned our Yahoo! PPC account into an unusable pile of AdGroup junk. Way to go Yahoo!

The good news is Yahoo! was smart enough to develop an import feature in Panama that allows advertisers to import their Google AdWords account into their Yahoo! account. At first I though this would be a great way to get AdWords advertisers who had yet to try out Yahoo! Search Marketing to try it out. Now I am realizing that many current Yahoo! advertisers will be forced to utilize this AdWords import function to completely rebuild their Yahoo! account…which means throwing out all of the work they have done on their Yahoo account. Ouch.

While this is an easy fix, it pains us to throw away the many of hours of work we spent building our Yahoo! account…and it hurts even more that we have to do it just because Yahoo! couldn’t find a better way to make the transition work.

So, are we the only people who have had their Yahoo! account blown up by Panama? Let us know by leaving a comment!