PageZero‘s Mona Elesseily is arguably the preeminent authority on the Yahoo! search marketing platform and has even written a book on the subject, “The Unauthorized Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook.” The last time we met, we’d just been given the scoop on Panama, Yahoo!’s new platform.

Mona pointed out obvious improvement, such as a redesigned (much more intuitive) interface, convergence of feature sets (geo-targetting, etc) into one application and improved metrics.

After having had a couple more months of testing, she now spoke with even more enthusiasm for Panama’s evolution from the previous system.

“The forecasting tools which were incorporated into Panama are excellent. They’re very granular, they give you a lot of information. Specifically, the tool will show you the percentage of missed clicks. If you bid a dollar, and the dollar got you 25 % of the traffic, the tool will tell you, ‘You’re missing out on 75% of the traffic, you may want to increase your bid.’”

Once again, touting campaign groups and monitoring additions, Mona points out that Panama also allows for rapid campaign deployment.

“Fast Ad Activation puts ads up on the entire network… in about five minutes.”

Currently, AdWords won’t run ads on the entire advertising network until a lengthy approval process has been satisfied… giving Panama advantage in this arena.

Once Yahoo! is out of the migration process and new advertisers are allowed to employ Panama, we’ll be waiting anxiously. Perhaps the delay will give Mona time to draft a new book?