Search giant Yahoo has launched a completely new version of its search advertising platform. Codenamed Panama, it is designed to be more user-friendly and relevant for marketers, and enables firms to target customers with greater accuracy.

The platform gives advertisers a range of new tools to do their jobs more easily and efficiently, including a control panel that provides greater insight into campaigns and the ability to enhance or moderate campaigns at every stage, said Yahoo.

"The legacy system we're replacing needed a completely new platform, which has been a long-time coming," said Yahoo's Richard Firminger. "We're developing an entirely new system from the ground up which is designed to be robust, fast, scalable and future proof."

Panama is more goals-centric than previous offerings, Firminger added, automatically showing marketers the cheapest way to meet cost-per-acquisition or return-on-ad-spend targets. In addition, the new platform features a faster content review process, which enables the speedy launch of new campaigns, Yahoo said.

"The platform can also cope with the future in whatever way Yahoo wants to turn, whether that's to mobile platforms or mining richer forms of advertising on search results," said Firminger.

Linus Gregoriadis, head of research at internet marketing specialist E-consultancy, said that the early feedback suggests Panama will improve click-through rates for firms that use it in their search-engine marketing strategies.

"Agencies who have used the long-awaited Panama platform describe it as a 'polished-up version of Google', which isn't a bad thing given the success its competitor has had," Gregoriadis added. “But the problem for Yahoo and MSN in Europe is the lack of traffic volume. Google has such domination - 70 to 80 percent of searches."