Search Engine Marketing Conferences 2017: What Was Worth Attending

Search engine marketing conferences in 2017 ranged from genuinely useful to expensive room-fills with recycled slide decks. The best ones, SMX, Hero Conf, and MozCon among them, offered a combination of technical depth, vendor access, and peer conversation that you could not easily replicate through blog posts and webinars alone. The worst ones sold you a ticket to watch someone read their own agency case study at you for 45 minutes.

If you were in paid search or SEO in 2017 and trying to decide where to spend your conference budget, the decision was less about which events existed and more about what you actually needed to take back to the business.

Which Conferences Were Actually Worth Attending in 2017?

The SEM conference calendar in 2017 was crowded. Here is what the main events actually offered, without the promotional framing.

SMX (Search Marketing Expo) ran multiple events across the year, with SMX West in San Jose in March and SMX East in New York in September being the flagship editions. Third Door Media, the same group behind Search Engine Land, produced them. The content was consistently technical. Sessions covered AdWords structure, Quality Score mechanics, attribution modelling, and automation at a level of detail that suited working practitioners rather than executives looking for a high-level view. If you managed significant paid search budgets and wanted to stress-test your approach against what other practitioners were doing, SMX was the right room.

Hero Conf was the most focused event on the calendar. Run by Hanapin Marketing, it was exclusively paid search. No SEO tracks, no social, no content marketing. Just PPC. That specificity was its strength. The audience was self-selecting: people who worked in paid search every day and wanted to talk to other people who worked in paid search every day. The 2017 edition in Philadelphia drew a mix of in-house practitioners and agency specialists. If your job was running Google and Bing campaigns at scale, this was probably the most directly useful event of the year.

MozCon in Seattle sat slightly differently on the spectrum. It covered SEO and inbound more broadly, and the production quality was noticeably higher than most marketing conferences. Rand Fishkin was still at Moz in 2017 and the event carried his particular blend of data-driven thinking and community warmth. The sessions were more strategic than technical and the audience included a higher proportion of agency owners and marketing managers than working-level practitioners. Whether that was a strength or a limitation depended entirely on what you needed.

Pubcon had been running since 2001 and remained a solid mid-tier option in 2017, particularly the Las Vegas edition in October. It covered both SEO and paid search, which made it useful for smaller teams where one person wore multiple hats. The content quality was variable across sessions, but the networking was genuinely good and the vendor floor gave you access to platform representatives in a way that was harder to arrange outside of conference settings.

BrightonSEO deserves a mention for European practitioners. Twice-yearly in Brighton, UK, it was free to attend (with paid workshops available) and had developed a reputation for high-quality, practitioner-submitted sessions. The April 2017 edition was particularly well-regarded. For UK and European search marketers, it offered more accessible value than flying to the US for SMX.

What Topics Were Actually Moving the Needle at SEM Conferences in 2017?

2017 was a specific moment in search marketing. Google had been rolling out expanded text ads. Bing was growing its share in certain verticals. Automation was becoming a genuine strategic question rather than a theoretical one. And video, particularly YouTube advertising, was forcing paid search practitioners to think beyond the keyword.

The video thread running through 2017 SEM conferences was notable. YouTube TrueView had matured enough that serious practitioners were building it into paid search funnels rather than treating it as a separate channel managed by a different team. Sessions on audience targeting, intent signals, and cross-channel attribution were connecting search and video in ways that had not been standard practice two or three years earlier.

This matters because the conversation about video marketing was no longer happening in isolation from performance channels. The practitioners in the room at Hero Conf and SMX were asking how video fit into a paid search funnel, how to use YouTube data to inform search bidding, and how to measure video’s contribution to conversion without double-counting. Those were commercially grounded questions, and the conferences that answered them well earned their attendance fees.

Other dominant topics in 2017 included:

• Smart bidding and automated rules in AdWords, and when to trust them versus override them
• Attribution beyond last click, particularly data-driven attribution which Google had made more accessible
• Audience layering on search campaigns, using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) at scale
• Local search and the growing importance of Google My Business for multi-location businesses
• Voice search as an emerging consideration, though most practitioners were appropriately sceptical about overstating its near-term impact

How Should You Have Evaluated Conference ROI Before Booking?

I have sat through enough conferences to know that the ROI calculation is almost never done properly before the booking. Someone sees a speaker lineup they like, the company has budget available, and the ticket gets expensed. That is not a strategy.

When I was running agencies, I applied a simple filter before approving conference spend: what specific problem are we trying to solve, and is there evidence that this event has solved it for people like us before? If the answer to either part was vague, the budget stayed in the business.

For SEM conferences specifically, the questions worth asking before booking in 2017 were:

• Is the session content practitioner-level or executive-level? These are different events for different people.
• What is the ratio of vendor sessions to independent practitioner sessions? A high vendor ratio means the content agenda has been partially sold.
• Who actually attends? The speaker lineup tells you less than the attendee profile.
• Are there workshops with hands-on components, or only keynotes and panel discussions?
• What is the policy on sharing session slides and recordings afterward? If you can get the content without attending, the attendance value comes from the networking.

The last point matters more than most people acknowledge. If the real value is in the conversations rather than the sessions, then your pre-conference preparation should focus on who you want to meet, not which talks you want to see. I have had more useful conversations in conference hotel bars than in main stage keynotes. That is not a criticism of the keynotes. It is just an honest account of where the commercially useful information actually flows.

Where Did Video Marketing Fit Into the SEM Conference Agenda?

By 2017, the separation between search and video as distinct disciplines was starting to look increasingly artificial. Google owned YouTube. Audience intent data from search was informing YouTube targeting. And the practitioners managing large Google budgets were increasingly expected to have a view on video, even if a separate team was producing the creative.

I saw this shift clearly when I was managing significant ad spend across multiple clients. The paid search team and the video team were having conversations they had not needed to have two years earlier. Attribution was the central tension: when a user watched a YouTube ad and then converted via a branded search three days later, where did the credit go? Most platforms gave it to the last click. Most practitioners knew that was wrong. The conferences that addressed this honestly, rather than deferring to platform-provided attribution models, were the ones worth attending.

Understanding how to align video creative with specific campaign objectives was a recurring theme. The gap between what video could do and what most advertisers were asking it to do was significant. Aligning video content with marketing objectives is not a creative question, it is a strategic one, and the SEM conferences that treated it as such produced more useful content than those that handed video sessions over to production-focused speakers.

For anyone thinking seriously about video’s role in a paid search funnel, the data on how video affects engagement and time on page is worth understanding. Wistia’s research on video and time on page gives useful context on how video changes user behaviour on landing pages, which has direct implications for paid search landing page strategy.

The question of which platforms to use for video distribution was also becoming more complex by 2017. YouTube was dominant but not the only option, and practitioners were starting to ask harder questions about where video investment should go. Choosing video marketing platforms requires a clearer framework than “go where your audience is,” particularly when you are managing budget against specific conversion targets.

What the Conference Circuit Missed About Real Paid Search Work

There is a gap between conference content and the actual work of running paid search at scale. Conferences tend to showcase success stories. The accounts that are working well, the campaigns that hit their targets, the attribution models that produced clean results. What you hear less about is the campaign that should have worked and did not, the budget that was wasted on broad match before anyone caught it, or the client who changed their conversion tracking mid-flight and corrupted three months of data.

I ran a paid search campaign for a music festival at lastminute.com that generated six figures of revenue within roughly 24 hours. The campaign structure was not complicated. The keyword list was tight, the match types were controlled, the landing page was clean. It worked because the fundamentals were right, not because we had done something clever. That kind of result does not make a compelling conference session because there is no narrative arc. But it is more representative of how good paid search actually works than most of the case studies you see on stage.

The conferences that came closest to honest practitioner content were the ones with smaller, workshop-style sessions where speakers shared account data and the audience could ask uncomfortable questions. Hero Conf did this reasonably well. The main stage at larger events was less useful for that kind of exchange.

For a broader view of how video was being integrated into performance marketing thinking in 2017 and beyond, SEMrush’s video marketing analysis covers the strategic and channel-level considerations that were shaping practitioner decisions during this period.

How Did Physical and Virtual Event Formats Compare for SEM Learning?

In 2017, the in-person conference was still the dominant format for serious professional development in search marketing. Virtual events existed but were not yet the default. The pandemic-driven shift to virtual that happened in 2020 was still three years away, and most practitioners had limited experience of what a well-run virtual event actually looked like.

That said, the mechanics of running effective events, whether physical or virtual, share more than people acknowledge. The challenge of keeping attendees engaged, of designing an environment where useful conversations happen, of making the content worth the time investment: these problems do not disappear when you move a conference online. B2B virtual events have their own set of design considerations that are distinct from simply recording a conference and streaming it.

For physical events in 2017, the booth and exhibition floor dynamics were a significant part of the value proposition. Vendors used conference floors to demonstrate platforms, offer account audits, and build relationships with practitioners who might not otherwise take a meeting. The design and execution of that physical presence mattered. Trade show booth ideas that attract visitors are not just about aesthetics. They are about creating the conditions for a useful conversation to start.

As the industry has moved toward hybrid and virtual formats, the equivalent challenge is designing a digital presence that does the same work. Virtual trade show booth examples show how some organisations have approached this, though the execution quality varies considerably.

One thing the 2017 SEM conference circuit did not do well was engagement design. Sessions ran back to back. Attendees sat in darkened rooms looking at slides. The networking was largely unstructured. The events that stood out were the ones that created deliberate conditions for interaction rather than just filling a schedule. This is a problem that has not gone away, and it is one reason why virtual event gamification has attracted serious attention as a way of solving the engagement problem that physical conferences never fully cracked either.

What Should You Have Taken Back to the Business From a 2017 SEM Conference?

The test of any conference is not what you learned in the room. It is what changed in the business afterward. Most conference attendance produces no measurable change. People come back with notebooks full of ideas, share a summary email with their team, and return to the same processes they left.

The practitioners who extracted genuine value from SEM conferences in 2017 tended to do a few things differently. They went with a specific question they needed answered rather than a general desire to “stay current.” They identified two or three sessions directly relevant to a live business problem. They arranged at least one meeting with a vendor or peer before the event started. And they came back with one specific change to test, not a list of ten things to eventually get around to.

Early in my career, I learned that the constraint of no budget or no resource forces a clarity that abundance rarely produces. When I was refused budget for a new website in my first marketing role, I taught myself to code and built it. That experience shaped how I think about conference learning: if you cannot implement something without additional budget or headcount, it probably was not the most useful session you attended.

The most actionable SEM conference content in 2017 was around things practitioners could test immediately: bid strategy adjustments, audience layer configurations, ad copy frameworks, landing page structures. The sessions on emerging technology and long-term industry direction were interesting but rarely produced a change in behaviour the following Monday morning.

For video specifically, the actionable takeaways from 2017 conference content centred on audience-based buying on YouTube, the use of customer match to connect search and video audiences, and the measurement frameworks needed to evaluate video’s contribution to search-driven conversions. HubSpot’s analysis of B2B and B2C video marketing trends provides useful context on how video strategy was evolving during this period across different business types.

Understanding how to measure video performance at a channel level was also becoming more sophisticated. Wistia’s framework for video KPIs is a useful reference for anyone trying to move beyond view counts toward metrics that connect to business outcomes. And Unbounce’s video marketing guide covers the conversion-focused thinking that was increasingly influencing how paid search practitioners thought about video creative.

If you are building a broader understanding of how video fits into a performance marketing strategy, the video marketing hub here at The Marketing Juice covers the channel-level and strategic questions that connect to what practitioners were working through in 2017 and continue to work through today.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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