Migrate Amazon Ads reports without breaking your measurement

Amazon Ads has put a deletion date on its old reporting workflow. The legacy Sponsored Ads and Amazon DSP report pages shut down on December 31, 2026. Amazon says saved reports, scheduled reports, report sends, and historical data still on those pages will be permanently deleted.

The migration tool is scheduled to be available by the end of August, which makes this an operating task now—not a December cleanup. Moving a report name and schedule is the easy part. Preserving what the number means, who receives it, and which decision depends on it is the real migration.

Treat December 17 as the working deadline

Amazon opened manual migration on June 8 and says self-migration becomes available at the end of August. On November 16, the old report centers enter a 45-day warning period. On December 17, net-new report creation and editing are disabled; existing reports remain read-only until the December 31 shutdown.

That makes December 17 the last practical correction gate. A team that discovers a broken filter or missing schedule after that date can still read the old output, but it cannot repair the legacy configuration. Amazon also says the dates are subject to change, so preserve the current notice and assign someone to recheck it.

Start with all reports, not only the ones executives recognize. Include scheduled email sends, agency exports, reconciliation files, pacing sheets, client dashboards, and low-frequency monthly reports. A quiet report can still feed a critical forecast.

Inventory the decision before the file

For every report, record the owner, recipients, accounts, countries, campaigns, filters, dimensions, metrics, time grain, attribution expectation, delivery schedule, downstream destination, and the decision it supports. Save one representative legacy output and its configuration before rebuilding it.

This turns migration into a control test. If nobody can name the decision, the report may be safe to retire. If a finance close, bid rule, client invoice, or weekly budget review depends on it, the report needs an accountable owner and a documented metric contract.

Do not assume the new tool will reproduce every legacy report today. Amazon lists several items as planned for later in 2026, including MRC viewability, Benchmarks, Conversion Path, Sponsored Products video, Sponsored Products prompts, Sponsored Products across retailers, and some legacy Sponsored Brands targeting and search-term reporting. Flag those dependencies before disabling anything.

Translate metric meaning, not just column names

Unified reporting standardizes terminology across sponsored ads and Amazon DSP, but familiar labels can return a different scope. Amazon’s clearest warning is for DSP conversions: the unified base metric Purchases includes promoted and halo purchases. The old DSP Purchases maps to Purchases (promoted). Using the base metric without that translation can make a dashboard rise even when campaign performance did not change.

Conversion timing also changes. Unified reports place conversions on the traffic date—the date of the ad interaction—rather than the later conversion date used by former DSP and legacy Sponsored Brands reporting. Historical daily curves can shift toward earlier dates even when total attributed conversions are unchanged.

Lookback intervals disappear from metric names, but they do not disappear from measurement. Amazon says seller Sponsored Products base metrics use a seven-day lookback, vendor Sponsored Products use 14 days, and other campaign types generally use 14 days unless a DSP campaign has flexible windows. Store that campaign-type logic in the mapping instead of inferring it from the new label.

Test the history window before trusting a total

Unified reporting has different history and pull limits by time grain. Hourly data is limited to 14 days. Date-level history can extend 24 months, but one pull is capped at 120 days. Weekly pulls can span up to 15 months. Monthly history extends 72 months, while one monthly pull is capped at 25 months; yearly and date-range summaries can span 72 months.

Some fields begin later. Advertised product and Converted product are available from February 13, 2025; Audience segment from February 9, 2025; and Frequency group from January 16, 2026. Reconciled cost and ROAS begin August 4, 2024, Reach begins July 1, 2024, and off-Amazon conversions begin June 27, 2025.

Amazon says an unavailable dimension can produce null attributes, while a limited-history metric can produce a partial aggregate. Therefore, a completed export is not proof of complete data. Test the requested range against the field-level availability table and label partial periods in downstream dashboards.

Run an overlap, ownership, and access test

Rebuild each critical report with the same account set, campaign cohort, date range, filters, and grain as the frozen legacy sample. Compare row counts and totals, then classify differences: an expected semantic change, a history-limit gap, a non-applicable dimension, a permission restriction, or an unexplained variance that blocks cutover.

Also test delivery. The new reporting page can schedule daily, weekly, or monthly sends with a selected time zone. Amazon states that anyone with an emailed report link can view it even without an Amazon account or Ads Console access. Treat the recipient list as an access boundary: remove stale vendors and personal addresses before recreating the schedule.

Only then reconnect spreadsheets, BI models, agency scorecards, and automated decisions. Keep the old and new outputs running through at least one complete operating cycle, with a named owner signing off on the mapping and accepted differences.

The Operator Read

December 31 is the deletion date, but December 17 is the correction deadline and the end of August is the start signal.

Do not measure success by how many schedules were copied. Measure it by whether the team can explain every changed total, identify every partial window, show who can open each delivery, and trace each dashboard back to an approved metric definition.

Inventory the decision, translate the metric contract, run an overlap test, and cut over with evidence. A reporting migration is complete only when the business still makes the same decision from a number it understands.