FAQ

What’s included in the ticket price?

Conference tickets include access to all sessions on your registered days, the roundtable discussions, the networking reception on Day 1 evening, a light breakfast, lunch and refreshments throughout.

Deep Dive Day tickets include the full-day workshop, lunch, and refreshments.

The attendee dinner on Day 1 evening is pay-your-own-way. We organise the logistics and reservation; you cover your meal and drinks.

Travel and accommodation are not included.
Is it possible to attend only one or two days?

Yes. You can register for the 2-day conference only (29–30 September), the Deep Dive Day only (1 October), or the full 3-day pass. Ticket options and pricing are under the ticket section.

We recommend to book all three days. The conference and Deep Dive cover different modes — one is about building perspective, the other is about applying it.

One day conference tickets (29 or 30 September) are only available on request and are subject to availability.
Are there discounts for teams, academics, or charities?

Teams: Each additional attendee from the same company, registered at the same time, receives €200 off a 2-day pass. You’ll get a discount code after the first registration is completed.

Charity, academic, and government: Half price. Eligibility is confirmed by email. Contact the registration team before booking.
Can I expense the ticket? How do I make the case to my manager?
Most attendees are expensed or have the ticket covered by a training budget. A few things that usually help the conversation:
- Relevant professional development for search teams: structured sessions, expert-led discussions, and documented takeaways from the roundtables.
- The Deep Dive Day is a direct training investment — a full day on a specific discipline with a recognised practitioner.
- The content is specific to the current state of search in 2026 — AI overviews, GEO tracking, AI Max, incrementality measurement — not evergreen material that could be found in a blog post.
- Attendees come back with specific tactics and contacts, not a notebook of general principles.
If you need specific documentation or a certificate for your finance or HR team, let us know.
What’s the structure across the three days?

29–30 September (Conference): Two parallel tracks – SEO/GEO and PPC – running across two full days. Keynotes bring the whole room together; track sessions split by discipline. Roundtable discussions run in the afternoon. Networking reception on Day 1 evening, dinner for registered attendees afterwards.

1 October (Deep Dive Day): A separate day of full-day hands-on Deep Dives with expert facilitators. Four Deep Dives run in parallel, you pick one. This is implementation, not inspiration. Deep Dive Day requires a separate ticket or the full 3-day ticket.

Each conference day morning begins with an optional 5K run through Berlin. No performance pressure. Just a good start and the first networking opportunity of the day.
What are the Deep Dives and who are they for?
Each Deep Dive is a full day (9am–5pm) with a expert facilitators, working on real problems with real tools. They’re small groups by design — the format only works if there’s actual dialogue.

The four Deep Dives at SMX Advanced 2026:
- Advanced Google Ads Scripting & AI — with Nils Rooijmans. For practitioners who want to build, fix, and extend scripts using AI. Requires at least 2 years of Google Ads experience and prior exposure to Scripts.
- Technical SEO Strategies in an AI World — with Johan von Hülsen. Crawling, indexation, internal linking, and how GenAI search changes the picture. Requires solid technical SEO foundations.
- Advanced Google Ads Beyond Search — with Jyll Saskin Gales. Performance Max, Demand Gen, YouTube — bidding, targeting, and creative frameworks at an advanced level.
- Content Audit Along the Messy Middle — with Ann-Kathrin Reitmeyer and Oliver Kuttruff. Journey mapping, AI-supported content audits, and gap identification using Screaming Frog and ChatGPT.
Each Deep Dive has its own prerequisites. Check the descriptions before booking to make sure the level is right for you.
What language is the event in?

English only. All sessions, Deep Dives, roundtables, and materials are in English. Attendees come from across Europe and internationally — the working language is English throughout.

Where exactly is the event? How do I get there?

The event is at Meliá Hotel Berlin, Friedrichstraße 103, 10117 Berlin — in central Berlin, directly on Friedrichstraße, two minutes from Stadtmitte U-Bahn station.

Berlin is well connected by rail from most of Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and beyond. Direct flights run from across Europe into Berlin Brandenburg (BER). The venue is roughly 40 minutes from BER by S-Bahn.

If you’re staying overnight, we recommend the Meliá where we offer a room block, or nearby hotels on Friedrichstraße — walking distance keeps the networking going after sessions end.
I can watch talks online for free. Why pay to travel to Berlin?

Online learning has never been stronger. That is exactly why an in-person event has to offer something different.

The roundtables and corridor conversations are where the real work happens: the peer who’s running the exact attribution experiment you’re stuck on, the speaker who gives you a completely different framing of your problem over lunch, the connection that turns into a hire, a collaboration, or a client six months later. That doesn’t happen on a livestream.

Online learning tells you what to think. In-person challenges you in real time with questions from people who’ve already tried what you’re about to try, and found out what doesn’t work.

SMX Advanced also has formats that are structurally impossible to replicate online. The roundtable discussions run on specific, pre-defined problems with a facilitator, a shared document, and outcomes that feed back into the room. The Deep Dive workshops are a full day of hands-on implementation with a recognised expert. It’s structured coaching where your specific account or domain is in the room. Neither of those work online.
What can I get here that I can’t get elsewhere?
A few things that are structurally impossible online:
- Access to speakers. SMX Advanced is designed for interaction. You can walk up to Ginny Marvin, Jyll Saskin Gales, or Johan von Hülsen after their session and ask the follow-up question you’d never get answered on LinkedIn.
- The roundtables. Each table runs on a specific, pre-defined problem such as GEO measurement, brand representation in LLMs, AI creative at scale – with a facilitator and a shared document. The conversation is off the record. These are consistently the highest-rated sessions.
- The Deep Dives. Day 3 (1 October) is a full day of hands-on implementation with an expert in the room, working through real problems from real accounts. It’s structuredcoaching, not a presentation.
- Peer density. Everyone in the room is senior. The people sitting next to you have the same pressures, the same problems, and a different set of solutions. That concentration doesn’t exist anywhere online.
Is the content truly expert-level, or is it repackaged beginner material?

Sessions are selected on the assumption that everyone in the room already knows thefundamentals. Nobody is going to explain what a canonical tag is, or introduce Smart Bidding from scratch.

The PPC sessions cover bidding strategy under automation, incrementality measurement, statistical failure modes in large accounts at $770M+ spend scale, and multi-model AI workflows for paid media. The SEO/GEO sessions cover indexation mechanics, rendering strategy for agentic crawlers, GEO citation tracking, and LLM ecosystem differences across platforms.

If you have less than two to three years of active experience in your track, some sessions will be difficult to follow and we would recommend to attend SMX Munich instead.
Is this a vendor-sponsored event? Will I be pitched at?

No. SMX Advanced is run by Rising Media – not a software company, not an agency. No session is bought or placed by a sponsor. Speakers are selected based on what they have to say, not who’s paying for the badge lanyards.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. It means the speaker on measurement isn’t going to recommend their own platform, and the speaker on GEO tracking isn’t pitching their tool.
I have a question that isn’t answered here.

Email us at [email protected] or if you prefer, give us a call at +49 8151 5566045.