SUNNYVALE, California: Web search giant Yahoo says its Project Panama advertising revamp is paying dividends. The project was launched last month to improve the monetisation of search queries by factoring-in the number of times an ad is clicked when choosing which ads to run alongside search results.

Cfo Sue Decker told a technology conference in San Francisco the early performance of Panama had been in line with earlier predictions and the company was "really pleased" with the new system. It was designed to help Yahoo regain ground lost to search leader Google.

Decker added: "Click-through rates are better. We've also seen much higher quality leads being generated to advertisers at lower prices."

Yahoo shares slid around 40% in 2006 but have climbed back this year, thanks to expectations that Panama will reinvigorate sales growth.

Data sourced from Financial Times online; additional content by WARC staff