How to switch monitoring vendors without losing useful history
Plan an overlap period, preserve original observations and document changed definitions so a vendor move does not break your team's reporting.
Moving to a new monitoring service can leave a team with two histories that look comparable but were collected differently. A market label changes, timestamps move to another timezone, or a visibility metric uses a new denominator. Plan the move as a reporting change as well as a software change. Your future analyst should be able to tell what happened on each side of the handover.
Inventory what you need before giving notice
List the configured brands, own domains, keywords, engines, locations and devices. Preserve the schedule and any exceptions used during promotions. Capture the team's advertiser classifications separately from the observations themselves. A current label may describe a relationship that did not exist when an older ad was collected, so record its effective date where you know it.
Ask the outgoing vendor for a sample of every export you expect to retain. Open the files and test whether a colleague can locate a specific observation using them. Include supporting assets only when the service actually provides them and your agreement allows retention. A spreadsheet of summary counts will not replace the original context if the team later needs to review one advertisement.
Keep an untouched archive and a working copy
Save the vendor's original export in an approved location with the export date and account scope. Use a separate copy for normalization. Document any conversion from local time to UTC, any domain cleanup and any renamed fields. Preserve the original values alongside the normalized ones where practical. The purpose is to let another analyst reconstruct your decisions without having to contact the person who ran the migration.
Agree retention and access with the people who own the information. Restrict files that include account details or sensitive tracking identifiers. Decide who can retrieve the archive after the old subscription ends. Do not assume that a vendor will keep your account accessible indefinitely because an export request is still pending.
Map definitions before joining charts
Create a short field dictionary. For each old field, record its meaning, the closest new field and whether the mapping is exact. Country and city coverage should remain distinguishable. A failed check should not be converted into a successful check with zero ads. Where a value has no reliable equivalent, keep it as a separate field or leave the new value empty.
Metric names need the same treatment. Google's impression-share documentation defines the metric using received impressions and estimated eligible impressions. A vendor's percentage of captured ads has a different denominator. Use separate series unless you can document equivalent definitions, scope and calculation rules. Renaming both columns 'share' does not make a combined trend meaningful.
Run an overlap that tests your actual configuration
Choose a manageable period when both services can collect the same planned coverage. Avoid making an unusual promotion the only comparison period unless that promotion is the reason for the purchase. Match the query spelling, engine, location and device as closely as the products allow. Keep a record of timing differences because two checks at different moments can legitimately show different ads.
Compare planned checks with completed checks in each system and account for failures or delays.
Review several individual observations instead of comparing only total advertiser counts.
Ask a second analyst to retrieve the same query and device context from both systems.
Keep unexplained differences in a handover note rather than deleting inconvenient rows from the comparison.
Decide what belongs in the new service
Historical data does not always need to be imported into the replacement application. A searchable, well-documented archive can be sufficient if the new product cannot preserve the original schema. Ask the incoming vendor to demonstrate import support before planning around it. If imported observations receive a new timestamp or lose their source, the resulting convenience may cost useful context.
Ads Lighthouse currently preserves the observations it collects and lets a team maintain brand domains and advertiser relationships. We do not promise a general importer for other vendors' histories. Discuss a migration through our contact page before assuming old data can appear inside the panel. Keep the outgoing archive available independently until the agreed process has been verified.
Set a handover date, appoint the owner of the new schedule and disable the old collection only after checking the replacement. Annotate the vendor change in recurring reports. The first report after the move should state the new collection scope and any break in comparability, so a change in the chart is not mistaken for a change in advertiser behavior.