With the recent launch of the new Yahoo PPC engine - Panama - I’ve been playing around a fair bit, trying to see exactly what’s different, what’s good and what’s not so good, that’s mostly going to be covered in another post. What I’m going to point out here is that there are differences in campaign creation on Panama. When you first create an account, and by default your first campaign, you are given a 5 step process to walk walk through.

However, when you create any subsequent campaigns, it expands out to an 8 step process.

So what’s the difference? Well, for your first campaign you aren’t given the ability to name either your campaign or ad group, instead you have to wait until after you’ve created them, then edit them. Also on the initial setup you’re limited to entering a maximum of 50 keywords, for subsequent campaigns you can enter a max of 500 keywords to start. This is kind of strange when you think about it. For the majority of small businesses that don’t have much experience, but decide to try out Yahoo’s PPC system they could believe that they’re limited to 50 keywords and they may have confusion over how to rename the campaigns / ad groups. I can see that they want to make things easier for someone signing up, and by eliminating 3 steps maybe it does appear that way, although asking to name your campaign & ad group wouldn’t add much of to the process, and I still don’t quite understand why there is a 10 fold difference in the number of keywords that you can enter to start (maybe someone slipped up and missed a zero out in the code?).