YSM Adds New Features to Panama

Hot on the heels of the Europe rollout, Yahoo have announced some new tools to aid advertisers using their New Sponsored Search platform (aka Panama). They've announced the following tools, which can be seen in your migrated Panama accounts as of today:

• Move Keywords Tool - this feature has been around in Adwords for donks, but Yahoo are finally adding it to their own setup. It enables advertisers to quickly and easily move keywords from one ad group to another.
• Ad Copy Assistance - this little tool might come in handy; when writing ad copy, you can request Yahoo's system show you copy currently being used by advertisers using similar keywords. Checking competitor ad copy should be something you're already doing (in order to best differentiate/leverage your own) but this tool makes checking that copy easier and quicker. The tool also gives best practice tips on writing copy.
• New Keyword Selector Tool - this new tool will suggest new keywords for your ad groups, and will also give you monthly traffic estimates surrounding these keywords. If this tool is more accurate and reliable than Google's, this could be a major plus point for Yahoo's system (Google's traffic estimator is often very inaccurate).

Whilst these tools are hardly groundbreaking, they do look useful and fairly user-friendly. I must confess though, I'm looking for some innovating moves by Yahoo at this stage, not just clones of features already existant in Adwords. The only truly unique feature offered so far by the new platform is the Account Access Controls. This tool allows advertisers to offer different users of their accounts various levels of access and permissions - from administrator (full access) to analyst (read only access).

Still, every little helps, and these releases today will bring Yahoo's new platform closer to Google in terms of functionality and overall efficiency for its advertisers.