Caught on Camera: Vic Strizheus’s Own Retargeted Ad Live on Fox News

Vic Strizheus opens this lesson by pulling up Fox News on his own screen, live, not as a demo he set up in advance but just to see what would show up. An ad appears for a Kajabi bonus tied to Chalene Johnson’s Marketing Impact Academy launch. He’d clicked an affiliate link for it once. That’s the whole trigger. Now the offer is following him around the internet, on a site he’s never paid a cent to advertise on directly, and he uses the moment to make a point that’s easy to miss until you see it happen in real time: retargeting doesn’t just work for people promoting their own products, it works just as well for affiliates promoting somebody else’s.

What does it actually look like when retargeting is already running?

He refreshes the Fox News homepage a few times to show the ad rotating, a clean, above-the-fold banner sized for the placement, appearing on one of the biggest news sites in the country. Buying that spot directly through Fox News’s own ad network would run a company a fortune. Through a retargeting network, the same placement costs a small fraction of that because you’re only paying to reach people already in your pool, not the entire readership of the site.

perfect example of awesomeness

That’s Vic Strizheus’s own reaction to catching the ad live, and it’s a fair one. The Kajabi affiliate promoting Chalene Johnson’s course didn’t build anything exotic. They took the same pixel-and-pool mechanism covered in the last lesson and pointed it at a product launch, riding retargeting’s reach into inventory that would otherwise be out of their budget entirely.

How do you actually pick a network to run this on?

He narrows the field to two he’s used directly. The first is Retargeter.com, which he’s upfront about being positioned toward serious operators rather than beginners. As Vic Strizheus puts it, “you don’t have an account manager for 500 bucks, but you do get one for 1,000 bucks per month”. Even the base plan buys real reach, thousands of visitors and well over a hundred thousand impressions, but the cost itself does some filtering. He’s candid that “this is probably one of the most expensive ones” out there, and he treats that as a feature, not a downside, because it keeps the network’s traffic quality high.

The second is SiteScout, and it solves the opposite problem: getting started without a deposit at all. SiteScout runs on real-time bidding, meaning you’re competing for ad placements against other advertisers in the moment, and the account itself is free to open. You talk to an account representative once you’re in, and you pay only as your campaigns actually run. Vic Strizheus is explicit that if a thousand-dollar-a-month commitment isn’t realistic yet, SiteScout is where you go instead, not as a lesser substitute but as the honest starting point.

Why does the cheaper option matter more than it looks like it should?

The lesson doesn’t frame SiteScout as the lesser choice, it frames it as the smarter entry point for anyone who hasn’t run a retargeting campaign before. A few reasons that matters:

• You can create an account and see the interface before committing any budget.
• Real-time bidding means you’re not locked into a flat rate that might not match what a placement is actually worth.
• SiteScout runs banner ads, mobile ads, rich media, and retargeting campaigns from one account, so you’re not managing multiple tools to test different formats.

Vic Strizheus walks through SiteScout specifically in the next lesson because it’s the one a beginner can actually open tonight. The bigger point underneath both networks is the same one from the Fox News screen capture: once you understand the mechanism, the network is just the delivery pipe. What you saw happen to a stranger’s affiliate promotion, you can set up for whatever you’re driving traffic to.

Neither network is presented as the only option. There are others out there, and he’s careful not to talk down whichever one you land on, only to be honest about what each is built for. Retargeter rewards someone who already has a budget and wants a managed relationship. SiteScout rewards someone who wants to learn the mechanics hands-on before committing real money to it. Pick based on where you actually are, not on which one sounds more impressive to say out loud.

The full session walks through opening a SiteScout account and building your first retargeting audience. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Haha, look at this, everybody. Perfect example of awesomeness, right? Retargeting at work. So I just went to foxnews.com just for the heck of it, just to see if I can, you know, pull anything, um, that, that might be, uh, you know, from our circles, uh, and uh, look what I see. Look at this right here. See that Kajabi bonus for Chalene Johnson’s Marketing Impact Academy? So I’m not sure if you, from, you know, if you’re following with what’s going on, or if you’ve seen this or not, but in the information marketing space, at the time of me filming this particular training for you, there is a big launch going on by Chalene Johnson, and she is promoting her Marketing Impact Academy training, right? And Kajabi, Kajabi guys, they are running a, an affiliate promotion for her course. And so what these guys did is, see, they retargeted me, because I went, you know, I’m on their email list, right, and I’m on their email list, and I’m on their email list, and I’m on their email list, right, and I’m on their email list, right, and I’m on their email list, right, and I’m on their email list, right. I clicked their link. I visited Shaleen’s, you know, Shaleen’s page, pre-launch videos, apparently, right, and, you know, I just went to firefoxnews.com, and I see this ad right here. Look at this, above the fold, right, nice and round, it’s like 300 by 250 size, perfect size, right, Kajabi bonus for Shaleen’s marketing, Impact Academy, right. And so what they’re doing is they’re actually promoting somebody else’s product, okay, product that they don’t even own, and they just use retargeting campaign, right? And see, I see their ad on foxnews.com, home page of foxnews.com. Do you think it would cost me a few bucks if I was just to go to Fox News ad network and just to advertise straight up on Fox News? It would cost me a small fortune, okay. With retargeting, I can get here for very, very, very little money. I mean, this is ridiculous, you know, what you can do with retargeting. So, again, perfect example, you know. And when we refresh this, let’s go ahead and refresh this real quick. You will see that there is probably going to be a different ad. Yep, there’s going to be a different ad showing up every time we refresh this, okay. So you can specify how many times you want the ad to show up. Again, see that, there is that ad again, okay. So how do we do this? Well, we do this by first going to a network, okay, because you do this, you do this by first going to a network, okay, because you do this by first going to a network. So, you know, sites like, you know, Fox News, pretty much, there is tens of, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of sites, you know, that are working with a particular network. You know, they have agreements, and they have this thing set up and dialed in, you know, to a science. It’s basically, you go to a network and you set up a campaign, and then network distributes your ads, you know, depending on where the, you know, where you’re retargeting prospect, or that person who’s on your retargeting list, where they’re going, and how much you’re paying for impressions and all that good stuff, okay. Now, there is a lot of different networks that you can go check out, you can just Google it if you want to. Two of the best ones that, as far as I’m concerned, one is going to be retargeter.com, okay, right over here. What I like about retargeter.com, now, this is not the cheapest one out there, okay, this is probably one of the most expensive ones that you will find. But, you know, as they say, you pay what, you know, you get what you pay for, right? I guess I better be careful saying stuff like that, you know, because I guess, you know, you can make this stuff work with other networks as well. You know, I don’t want to put any other networks down or anything. I’m not saying that retargeter is the only one that’s going to work for you, no, you know, there’s other ones that can work just as good. I personally like retargeter just because, you know, their price points kind of push a lot of wannabes away, you know. I mean, they start out at like, you know, 500 bucks, and, you know, you get 10,000 visitors, which is pretty cool, you get up to 175,000 impressions, okay. You get yourself, actually, you don’t have an account manager for 500 bucks, but you do get one for 1,000 bucks per month, okay. You can cancel at any time, all the good stuff, okay, self-serve, okay. Retargeter is great, they’re, you know, they’re a really, really cool company, they work with you, they’ll help you get going. Another one, if you don’t want to pay a lot of money, if you don’t want to pay like $1,000 to get started with retargeter, okay, you can go to SightScout, okay, SightScout.com. And what’s really, really awesome about SightScout is that they use what’s called RTB, okay, which is real time bidding system.

So, you can get yourself, you know, you can sign up. Let’s take a look at this here, I believe you can sign up for a free account. Yep, you can sign up for a free account. So you can create yourself a free account, okay, with SightScout. You will be able to, when you sign up, you’ll be able to talk to your account representative, okay, to your account rep, and they’ll help you, you know, get set up, okay. But you can essentially get in for nothing, and then you just pay as you go, okay, which is something really cool about SightScout. And they have, I mean, they can distribute your ads across, you know, as you can see here. You can do banner, you know, you can do banner ad campaigns, you can do mobile ads, rich media ad campaigns, retargeting ad campaigns. You can do all kinds of stuff on SightScout, it’s not just retargeting. So if I were you, you know, if you’re just getting started, you know, if you want to get your feet wet with retargeting stuff, I would say go to SightScout, create yourself a free account, and, you know, and get started from there.

What I will do is, I’m actually going to walk you through. Because this is free to sign up with SightScout and everything, I’m going to walk you through and show you how to set up your retargeting campaign using SightScout network, okay? So that way, when you go to SightScout, you will be familiar with how that stuff works. Alrighty, so let’s go ahead and start setting up our campaign, in the next video. Now, what we’re going to do first is we need to create ourselves what’s called a tracking pixel, okay, and I’m going to show you how to do that in the next video.

See you there.