yes, we are in the same boat. It's a nightmare having to re-arrange all the campaigns.

Once the hard work is finished i think it will be ok though.

oh great :( my turn next week.

If it is anything like the US roll out, watch out if you have "nested accounts". I had client logins that were originally under my account, that now have access to all my other clients.

I would login with each individual client user/pass and see how the accounts are actually laid out.

My original account structure was like this:

Company master login > Client 1
> Client 2
> Business Affiliate Account
> Client 3

After Panama:

Company Master Login > Client 3

Client 1 Login > Client 1
> Bussiness Affiliate Account

Client 2 - now somewhere on its own

Yahoo! says they cannot fix the way these are now nested which is terrible. The fix was to change around some permissions, so that the client could not see our affiliate account. They say there is no way to move the accounts around in the new system, and the fix was to have a new account created by the client (w/ all their billing info, etc) and then Yahoo could move all the keywords and ads over, and we could then delete the original account. We did not go for this, and instead deleted our account.

So just be prepared to look at it from the client side as well...they may end up having way more access then you ever imagined.

I got upgraded during the initial roll out of Panama, and I have figured out a better way for upgradation.

In Panama, all your categories present in Overture will become campaings and the system itself will create adgroups based on keywords. To avoid this confusion, i will recommend to:
1. Download the account(keywords, adtexts etc) from Overture
2. Delete all categories in Overture.
3. Upgrade the account.
4. Create the campaings/adtexts/keywords based on Panama's bulk upload file format.
5. Upload the file to your account.

Now you will have the same structure in Panama as you had in Overture.

Hope this will lessen your burden.

I upgraded to panama back in November, and thought I'd warn everyone about a problem I faced not once, but twice...

ISSUE CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS TO NOT SET YOUR ACCOUNT TO LIVE UNTIL YOU HAVE REVIEWED FOR ACCURACY.

I told our rep to turn it on once we finished the import...what they did was use our search bid amounts for the content bids. I came in on Monday to a cost per conversion of $200-something.

Because I had records of my instructions, I could prove they screwed up, so we got a few thousand bucks back.

I have never seen such totally confusing garbage as the new upgrade.
It's a total mess and we wont be bothering with it any longer. Just going to increase the Google budget.

It's a total mess and we wont be bothering with it any longer. Just going to increase the Google budget.

So true, this has to be the most over complicated system I have *ever* seen. I have no idea where to begin.

0/10 for user friendliness.

Annoying thing is traffic AND conversions are way down since they upgraded me so I have no choice but to rectify the mess they’ve created.

We are also finding that the most appropriate keyword is not being used.

For example I want to bid on the term 'widget box' but when a user types in 'widget box' Panama is using the term 'box widget dog'.

What is that all about?

It is taking me hours to re-arrange my accounts ready to submit them and when i do if comes up with loads of different errors, and the only suggestions they have for me is to delte the whole campaign (be offline for 3 days and loose my history) and submit from scratch!

Does anyone have any idea how to re-submit without errors?

Agreed, it's a complete mess. My keywords are all over the place, seemingly placed into random groups that weren't there in Overture. It's completely un-professional.

Not only that but my daily clickthroughs have gone from 20-30 to only 2-3.

Also, is there now no way of seeing a list of bidders for each keyword?

Not impressed one bit.

It has become so difficult to try and figure out where my keywords are placed that I am about to give up on Yahoo completely.

Before the change I was bidding around US$0.30 to stay in the top three for my main keyword. I am now at .50 and they tell me I'm at #5. I can't see who my competitors are as I live outside the market.

My monthly cost is about 1/3 of what it once was.

Their interface is cumbersome to work with and doesn't scale well when you have a sidebar. It's very frustrating.

I've already dropped out of DE & NL because of poor volumes of impressions. UK will be next as I have to keep upping my bids to ridiculous levels just to make the minimum each month.

I just had my card charged twice in a day for the first time. I checked to see why and despite turning off content match in the old system it seems the new one automatically turns it on. To me that is pretty much theft.

After having gone through the switch over to Panama i found the best way to resrturcture the account was to convert my adwords campaign and then bulk upload. I then pasued my old campaigns. So far I havent had too much bother having done it this way - apart from a few kw url's i had to update (although these were easily spotted by doing a bulk download and checking them in excel).

[edited by: Jonerock1t at 9:08 am (utc) on Aug. 23, 2007]