Yahoo’s Panama Migration: Mixed Reviews

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a surprisingly long article, in anticipation of Yahoo’s earnings call today, on experiences with Panama platform migration. The reviews and opinions presented are generally positive but the article also points out that some smaller businesses have had problems and frustrations.

Among the positive comments:

Chris Wallace, vice president of media for search-marketing firm iCrossing Inc., whose clients include Coca-Cola Co., says, “Our experience has been positive, in part because we do a significant amount of due diligence prior to migration” to the new system. Veronica Muth, a marketing coordinator for Telogis Inc., a fleet-management services and software firm in Costa Mesa, Calif., that spends about $3,000 a month on Yahoo search ads, agrees about the experience. “The migration process was easy,” says Ms. Muth, who attended a Yahoo seminar about the upgrade for advertisers last week.

And representative of the detractors:

Rob Montalbine says technical glitches prevented the Hawthorne, N.J., relocation-services company where he is Internet-marketing manager from accessing Yahoo’s search-ad system for most of three days after its upgrade. “With an aggressive search-marketing campaign and matching budget, three days is a millennium,” says Mr. Montalbine, whose company buys ads linked to 14,000 keywords through Yahoo and at times has spent more than $7,000 monthly on search ads.