Yahoo! Search Marketing rolled out its new advertising platform, dubbed Panama, today.

The biggest leap forward with Panama is that Yahoo has greatly simplified the process of signing up and purchasing CPC advertising on its properties. This is great news for all marketers.

Panama basically boils down the process to down to five simple steps, which means most folks will be up and running in no time flat.

So, to try this out, I thought I might try and buy some advertising for this blog. Here’s what I found.

Step 1. Choose a Geographic Location

I chose Entire Market (United States and Canada). I figured I might as well shoot wide – but you could refine your location to target a particular geographic area. Panama lets you plug in a zip code and a radius search to localize your ad even more specifically.

Step 2. Pick Your Keywords

Quite often when I get to this point I start to draw a blank about which keywords I’m going to choose. Thankfully Panama’s algorithm lets you type in some words that describe your product or service and it returns a number of suggested keyword combinations for you.

For the purposes of this experiment I used the terms ‘real estate’, ‘real estate marketing’ and ‘real estate consulting’ (hey, why not?). Out of the list Panama gave me, I picked the following 16 keywords:

real estate marketing tool
real estate agent marketing
real estate marketing idea
real estate marketing online
realtor marketing
real estate advertising
real estate advertising marketing
real estate web site
real estate internet marketing
real estate marketing strategy
real estate marketing plan
real estate marketing technique
real estate marketing system
advertising for realtor
marketing real estate web site
real estate lead generation

Step 3. Set Your Daily Advertising Budget

I figured I’d spend about $4 a day ($120 a month). Not extravagant by any means, but realistic given what little revenue this blog generates. I suspect this is in line with what a single Realtor would be spending as well, with large producers or Brokers spending significantly more.

Panama tells me that’ll let me get a maximum bid of $0.85 and result in 99,330 monthly impressions and 197 monthly clicks.

Of course this will vary considerably depending on what keywords you select in step 2.

Step 4. Create Your Ad

Here you can let your creative juices fly. Unfortunately for me, it’s late in the day and I’m pretty wiped so this is the best I could come up with. Hopefully you’ll be more successful.

Step 5. Activate Your Ad

Punch in your billing information and off you go! And this is where I stopped.

I really like Panama’s ease of use and I think its localization options will be especially valuable to real estate marketers.

My biggest concern is that I’m not sure it’s the right place to be spending my money. Just looking at my own traffic logs, I get barely any traffic at all from Yahoo’s search engine right now. Traffic from Google dwarfs it nearly 10 to 1. And that’s the crux of the problem.

No matter how many improvements it rolls out to its platform, Yahoo will be the perennial second placer behind Google AdWords. Despite pioneering the PPC concept (when it was Overture), Yahoo just can’t compete to the depth of Google’s network and the stranglehold it has on search.

I suppose if you can afford to add Yahoo to your PPC advertising plan, or if you’re experienced enough with AdWords and want to extend your reach, Panama will definitely make it easier to add Yahoo to your media mix.

But if you have a small budget and are just looking to dip your toes into PPC advertising, as I suspect is the case with most Realtors, I still think you’re better off sticking with Google.

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Zillow is spending between $13.67 to $21.44 a day on its PPC advertising and seems to be marketing itself to the functionally illiterate.

Some of the terms it’s buying:

• zindex
• third street
• 7th ave
• first street
• horlando
• orlanda
• orlande

Redfin, on the other hand, is spending between $23.06 to $170.34 a day and getting a little creative with its search terms – breaking out of the real estate box:

• seattle traffic
• seattle traffice
• seattle real estate

Trulia seems to be the heavyweight champ of online ad spending, running up a tab of $524.38 – $13,130 a day on its geographically based search terms.

• bay point ca
• gaviota ca
• geneseo ny
• jackson heights ny
• lake view terrace
• lamoore ca
• north castle ny
• oak view ca
• sun valley ca
• valhalla ny

How did I find this out?

By using Spyfu, the successor to the popular research tool GoogSpy, which has recently rebranded and relaunched itself as it has now evolved to track more than just the Google Adwords. From their press release:

The site is powered by Velocityscape Web Scraper Plus+, which constantly extracts data from search engines, Alexa, Dmoz, Wikipedia, and other sources.

The goal of Spyfu, like Googspy before it, is to help you discover the PPC keywords your competitors are buying. The search results give you a general overview of their daily ad buy, their cost-per-click, number of clicks and several other metrics – you can also see how they ranks on organic search results.

While fun to play around with, I’d take any of Spyfu’s results with a grain of salt; I manually entered some of the search terms into Google and rarely found any live campaigns actually running. But, the site is currently in Beta and promises that its database will grow (and theoretically get more accurate over time).

At the very least though, it’s an interesting exercise to conduct periodically. Spyfu shows there are 8266 real estate-related companies using 11309 popular search terms, so at the very least it should provide you with some inspiration in your own PPC advertising campaigns.

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Techcrunch is reporting that Google is launching a new beta program for webmasters or web site publishers who have AdWords accounts. Website Optimizer is designed to allow you to design different versions of your landing page, which will get served up randomly to visitors entering your site through the AdWords keywords you’ve bought.

The idea is that you’ll be able to see which versions results in the most activity and therefore, the highest number conversions from your ad buys.

I’ve signed up to be part of the beta and I think this would be a very useful tool for any Realtor either currently running AdWords promotions or actively considering Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. Though I’m not running any PPC campaigns right now (this blog gets pretty good SEO results on its own) I’d be very interested in seeing what results anyone who is, has with this program.

Personally, I still think it’s more effective to concentrate on developing highly placed organic search results through good content and effectively linking strategies. Though supplementing that with a few Long Tail Adwords couldn’t hurt, I suppose.

To that end, HitTail is another beta optimization service I’ve been playing around with lately. HitTail analyzes the content you post on your web site or blog and suggests underused keywords for you to buy as part of your marketing campaign. Interesting concept, though it remains to be seen if it works in practice.

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