Amazon Ads Agent Migration Guide: Manage AI Bids and Budgets

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What Amazon Ads Agent actually changed

The merger itself is a year old. At unBoxed last November, Amazon announced a unified Campaign Manager that brought the advertising console and Amazon DSP together. The unBoxed recap said it removed the need for separate accounts and manual metric compilation. Amazon Ads Agent is the new name for that platform, which now runs on agentic AI. It has three campaign types: sponsored ads, Display Video and Audio, and Full-Funnel Campaigns.

One correction, because a rumour is going around seller forums: Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands have not been retired. Sponsored ads are still their own campaign type, with manual controls. The change is on the programmatic side. DVA+ combines Sponsored Display, Sponsored TV and programmatic DSP campaigns into one buying flow.

Amazon's launch announcement says you can build campaigns manually, let the AI optimise for you, or mix the two. That choice is the most important setting in the platform.

The chat assistant vs the old campaign builder

The old builder was a set of forms. You picked a campaign type, entered keywords and set bids one field at a time. The new assistant works from plain-language requests. Amazon lists four capabilities: media planning (audience sizing, reach forecasts, budget allocation), AI targeting across keywords, products, categories and audiences, natural-language analytics, and guidance for Sponsored Products that applies bid, budget and targeting changes in one click.

According to Amazon's launch announcement, advertisers who used natural language to apply targeting recommendations saw more than 25% additional unique customers and cut cost-per-impression by more than 10% on average. Those numbers measure reach and cost per impression. They say nothing about profit. More shoppers reached at a cheaper rate only helps if those shoppers convert at a margin you can live with, so test before you trust it. The capabilities are still rolling out. Marketing Herald reported a beta for eligible advertisers across 20 marketplaces in 21 languages.

Full-Funnel Campaigns and DVA+: who should hand over the keys?

With Full-Funnel Campaigns, you provide the budget, the products and the creative. Amazon's AI then plans, runs and keeps optimising the campaign across sponsored ads, display, video and streaming TV. It is open to all US advertisers. Futurum notes that these campaigns are scored on a Long-Term Sales metric, which adds the estimated 12-month value of new-to-brand customers to immediate sales.

The beta numbers look strong. Futurum reports that Amazon says beta testers saw 67% higher long-term ROAS and a 29% lower cost to acquire new-to-brand customers than when they ran the same formats separately. Futurum adds two caveats. The comparison was against a blended average, not a holdout group. And Long-Term Sales is partly a forecast that Amazon both produces and grades. In a case study reported by Marketing Herald, a full-funnel campaign for dog-treat brand Canine Naturals drove 41% of its sales from new-to-brand shoppers over 206 days.

DVA+ has two modes. The default is a four-step flow: objective, products or brand URL, AI-generated creative, and budget. Advanced mode gives you back manual audiences, bid strategies, deals, supply sources and frequency caps. If you have run DSP alongside your programmatic display and PPC before, use advanced mode from day one. Amazon said DVA+ would roll out from late October through the end of the year.

Creative assets to prepare now

• Detail pages: Full-Funnel Campaigns builds video and display ads from your existing product pages. Your main images and A+ modules now feed your ads directly, so fix weak product photography and video before launch.
• Video: Streaming TV and online video placements need video. If you don't supply it, Amazon's creative agent will make it. In a pilot reported by Marketing Herald, Cuisinart's AI-generated assets lifted detail page view rate by 18 points over traditionally produced assets. That's one brand, though. Test AI creative against your own footage.
• Brand guardrails: Have logo files, approved claims and banned phrases ready in one document. Advertisers approve creatives before launch, so give that approval to one named person, not to whoever happens to be logged in.
• Spec check: The launch materials don't include a single spec sheet for DVA+. Don't assume your old Sponsored Display images or Sponsored Brands video edits will carry over unchanged. Check the creative requirements in the console before you brief a shoot.

Where did my reports go?

Amazon says the unified platform has a central reporting hub with standardised metrics across products and accounts, plus extended historical data. Full-Funnel reporting shows impressions, clicks and sales alongside new-to-brand and long-term sales. The chat layer adds natural-language analytics with peer benchmarks, which Amazon describes as replacing hours of manual report building.

Amazon has not published a list of which legacy reports are being retired. Until it does, treat every report your weekly process depends on as something you could lose. That includes search term exports, placement reports and DSP delivery breakdowns.

The second gap is structural. Futurum points out that Ads Agent only sees Amazon. Brands that also sell on Walmart, Target or their own DTC site still need independent measurement before they move budget based on Amazon's long-term sales forecast.

Billing changes to reconcile

Earlier this year, Amazon told a subset of sellers that sponsored ads charges would move from credit card billing to deductions from their seller account balance. That changes how risky automation is. When an AI-scaled budget is charged against your disbursement and not a card, overspend hits payouts and inventory cash straight away. Check the notification in Seller Central and your billing settings in the ads console to confirm when and how this applies to your account.

The DSP side has its own fine print. When the consoles were first unified, Digiday reported that sponsored ads would run without added fees but the DSP would keep its existing minimum spend requirements. Ask your Amazon Ads contact how this applies to DVA+ before you move programmatic budget.

A pre-migration checklist

1. Export everything: Pull campaign structures, bids, placement modifiers, negative keyword lists and at least 90 days of search term data before your account moves to the new flows. If a report disappears, this export is your only baseline.
2. Keep ranking campaigns manual: Exact-match campaigns that hold organic rank and branded defence campaigns stay under manual control in sponsored ads. Don't fold them into Full-Funnel Campaigns, where the AI decides how much budget they get.
3. Record your baselines: Note ACOS, TACOS, new-to-brand share and detail page view rate by ASIN for the last 60 days. You'll compare AI-managed results against these numbers.
4. Set up a holdout: Run Full-Funnel Campaigns on a test group of ASINs and keep a matched group on your current setup. Amazon's beta results weren't tested this way. Yours should be.
5. Assign approval rights: Decide who can accept AI recommendations, who approves creative and what spend change needs sign-off. Agree this before anyone opens the chat panel.

How to audit the agent's bid and budget suggestions

One-click apply saves time when the recommendation is right and costs money when it isn't. Run every suggestion through four checks:

• Margin check: Compare the implied bid against your breakeven ACOS. If the AI's target is above that line, reject it or cap it.
• Objective check: Find out what the campaign is optimising toward. A Full-Funnel campaign graded on Long-Term Sales will accept a short-term ACOS your finance team would reject.
• Stock check: Don't raise budget on an ASIN that's about to stock out. The agent optimises ads and doesn't manage your inbound shipments.
• Compounding check: Look for bid, budget and placement increases stacked on the same campaign. Each might be reasonable alone. Together they can double your spend.

Apply changes in batches, log every accepted recommendation with the date, and judge each batch over a full conversion window. We covered the early signs of this behaviour when Amazon's AI campaign filter first appeared.

Three ways the defaults can quietly inflate spend

First, AI recommendations get accepted with no review. Second, Full-Funnel Campaigns can move budget to streaming TV and display on the strength of a forecast. Third, DVA+ in default mode: the four-step flow asks for your objective, products, creative and budget. Frequency caps, supply sources and bid strategy are in advanced settings, so if nobody opens them, Amazon chooses them for you.

None of these is a bug. Each is a default. Defaults favour whoever set them.

Where agencies pull ahead

Digiday's reporting says operational know-how matters less now that AI handles setup and AMC queries. The edge moves to strategy, creative and reading performance correctly. Futurum describes the agency role as writing the context that steers the agents (brand rules, margin floors, briefs) and deciding what those agents are allowed to do. It also notes that the Amazon Ads MCP Server, in open beta since February 2026, gives outside agents one connection point for managing campaigns, running reports and accessing billing.

That is where a managed account beats a self-managed one. An in-house manager has one account to learn from. An agency running DSP management across many brands sees which AI recommendations pay off, which defaults overspend, and how DVA+ performs in different categories. It can then build that into the guardrails before your budget tests them.

Your next step this week: export your current campaign data, keep ranking and branded campaigns on manual, and test Full-Funnel Campaigns on a small group of ASINs against a matched holdout group before you accept a single one-click recommendation.

Amazon Ads Agent gives the AI control over bids, budgets and creative unless someone governs it. Hyperzon sets the margin floors, holdout tests and approval rules that keep AI-managed campaigns profitable. Get a free Amazon audit.

Article was originally published on 14 November, 2026