Amazon Reporting API adds completed-report warnings

What changed

This is a data-observability change, not a report-failure mechanism or an automatic correction service. Amazon’s completed-report retrieval endpoint, AdsApiv1RetrieveReport at POST /adsApi/v1/retrieve/reports, can include a warnings array. Each warning identifies a field and one or more codes. Implementation teams should consult the Warning signals section of Amazon’s New features guide before assigning meaning to an unfamiliar code or deciding how it should be handled.

The right response is to make warnings first-class pipeline data. Many reporting jobs currently reduce success to a binary state: request failed or file received. That model can miss a completed dataset whose values warrant context. Store the raw warnings with report ID, account, profile where applicable, report type, request parameters, retrieval time, schema version and downstream job run. This creates an audit trail that allows analysts to distinguish a shift in campaign behavior from a shift in report conditions.

Design a severity policy locally, but do not assume Amazon’s nonfatal label means every warning has identical business impact. A sensible initial policy can route previously unseen codes to review, flag known low-impact conditions in monitoring, and require analyst sign-off when a warning touches a field used in a key calculation. Preserve the delivered values rather than overwriting them, and make any transformation explicitly versioned. The warning is information about interpretation, not permission to silently repair data.

Test the integration with normal report retrieval, warning-free reports, multiple warnings and a deliberately unfamiliar warning code if a safe test path exists. Verify that parsers tolerate absent arrays, empty arrays and additional codes without failing. Update dashboards so a consumer can see that a metric was delivered with a relevant warning. Alerting should be proportionate: repeated warnings on a critical field may deserve escalation, while one low-impact signal may be logged for periodic review.

Why it matters for advertisers

Completed-report warnings close a gap between technical availability and analytical confidence. A file arriving successfully does not always mean every value should be interpreted without qualification. Treating the signals as metadata gives data teams a way to preserve continuity while making uncertainty visible. That is particularly useful for automated reporting, where an unnoticed field condition can otherwise spread into dashboards, pacing decisions and historical comparisons.