Before You Pay for Another Conference, Make It Pass These Five Tests.

Two questions come up whenever agency owners talk about conferences, and they're the right two. Which events have people who could actually buy from us? And when we go, do we come back with business, or with LinkedIn connections?

A checklist won't guarantee the answer. It will improve the decision, which is the most any checklist can do. Here are five tests, and Rome is run through them below, honestly, including the places where the answer might be "not for us".

Test 1. Are the companies relevant to what we sell?

Not "how many attendees". Which kinds of company, doing what, and could they matter to an agency with your service line and your client categories?

Affiliate Grand Slam is in Rome from 2 to 5 November at Fiera Roma. It's a performance-marketing event. Confirmed, with the role of each: brands and offer owners exhibiting, who are companies to investigate as potential clients, buying need still to be established; MaxWeb and TerraLeads, networks that run consumer offers and pay on performance; ClickBank and Digistore, marketplaces where offers are listed and affiliates choose them; MGID and Outbrain on native; PlatformPay on payments; TikTok, Meta and Google with staff.

The test is relevance, not presence. If, reading the confirmed list against your service line, nobody there could plausibly hire you, partner with you on performance, or refer you, stop here. That's a pass mark for the test and a fail for the trip, and it's a perfectly good outcome.

Test 2. Does our service or offer actually fit them?

Relevance says they're the right kind of company. Fit says you have something they'd want. For a potential client: the specific service, evidence of suitable work, a plausible reason they'd need it. For a network or offer owner: traffic capability and a proposed arrangement you could describe in a sentence. For a referral partner: a clear specialism they don't compete with.

Write it down for the top three on your list. If you can't write a sentence about why each would care, the fit isn't there yet, and no amount of floor time fixes that. The operators on stage belong under this test too: Nick Shackelford of Brez, Marisha Lakhiani of Mindvalley, Dayu Yang of EcommOps run brands and spend; their relevance to you depends on whether your work fits businesses like theirs, not on whether they're inspiring.

Test 3. Is there a realistic way to get a meeting?

An agency owner wrote what most people admit eventually: "The main conference is almost secondary. The good stuff is the 20–50 person side event, drinks, or 1:1 I set through the app." So the test is whether there's a mechanism, and how it works.

AGS uses the Match App. Every pass includes it. Once you hold a pass and the app is available under it, you request meetings with specific companies, and they accept or decline. Access varies by tier; the guide's inclusion table says exactly how. What's not included with any pass is a meeting. Requests are requests. A realistic plan expects some declines and builds the day around the acceptances, with the floor for the rest. An event that couldn't tell you this much would fail the test. This one can. Whether your shortlist accepts is still to be found out.

Test 4. What's the total cost, and which tier do we actually need?

The ticket is only the start of the bill. Flights, hotel, meals, transport, and the days away from delivery, which cost you whether or not anyone invoices for them. Then the tier: the least expensive pass that supports your actual goal, and an honest look at what an upgrade would add for your plan. Sometimes it adds something. Often the base tier is enough, and the guide is allowed to say so.

Then the question that replaces "does the trip pay for itself": what would this trip need to produce to justify its total cost for your agency? The inputs are yours: total trip cost, the contribution a new client or arrangement would make after delivery costs (after traffic and fulfilment costs for a performance deal), and the period you'd count it over. The Best Value for Money Guide, agency edition, has the worksheet for the full exercise. This page just tells you what goes in it.

Test 5. Do we have a preparation and follow-up plan?

The difference between cards and business isn't the event. It's whether you arrived with a shortlist and questions, and left with next steps and owners. Preparation: the shortlist, what you'll ask each, what evidence you'll bring. Follow-up: who owns each next step, by when, and how you'll know in ninety days whether the trip produced anything. If there's no plan, the honest forecast is a drawer of cards, whichever event it is.

Run Rome through it, and let it fail if it fails

Five tests. The AGS Rome 2026 Welcome Kit for Agencies gives you what you need to run them yourself: the confirmed list by category for tests 1 and 2, how taking part and the meeting process work for test 3, and the Best Value for Money Guide, included in the same request, for tests 4 and 5: pass comparison with inclusions, the total-trip budget, the break-even worksheet, and the preparation and follow-up checklist.

If Rome fails your five, you've reached a decision with evidence, which is worth having. If it passes, you'll know why you're going, what it costs, and what you'll do afterwards. That's not a sales claim. That's a buying test, and you get to mark it.