Where the Retargeting Pixel Actually Goes (and the Mistake That Wastes It)

Everything about retargeting sounds abstract until you actually build the piece that makes it work: the audience. Not a landing page, not an ad, just a named list that starts empty and fills up the moment your first visitor arrives. Vic Strizheus logs into his own SiteScout account on screen and walks through the exact three clicks it takes to create one, then shows you precisely where the resulting tracking code has to live for any of it to function.

What’s the very first thing you build before any ad can run?

Inside SiteScout, under Tools, there’s a Retargeting tab, and inside that, a button to create a new audience. That’s it, that’s the whole first step. You name it something that matches whatever you’re promoting, since you can run multiple audiences at once for different offers without them overlapping. Once it’s saved, you highlight it and click Get Tags, and SiteScout hands you a short script, your tracking pixel.

He’s honest that the code itself looks like nonsense if you’re not a developer. He doesn’t pretend to fully understand every line of it either, and says as much on camera. What matters isn’t reading the script, it’s knowing exactly where it goes. That’s a small but real permission slip for anyone who’s been avoiding this because it looks technical: you don’t have to understand the code, you just have to place it correctly, once.

Where exactly does that code belong on your page?

The pixel gets pasted onto whatever page your traffic actually lands on first, your landing page, right before the closing body tag in the HTML. If you built that page with a tool like LeadPages or Megaphone, there’s usually a dedicated field in the setup for tracking codes, and that’s where it goes. The moment someone hits that page, even before they decide whether to opt in, the code fires, a cookie lands in their browser, and they’re added to the audience you just built.

you can do so much good stuff it’s unbelievable what you can accomplish

That line comes right after he finishes explaining the setup, and it’s less about the software and more about what a single pixel makes possible once it’s live. Every visitor, opted in or not, becomes someone you can keep marketing to.

What happens if you retarget the wrong crowd?

Vic Strizheus is careful to flag a mistake that undoes all of this: building your retargeting audience from untargeted traffic in the first place. If your initial traffic source, a PPV campaign especially, sends you visitors who were never actually interested in what you’re promoting, retargeting just means you keep following the wrong people at your own expense. As he puts it, imagine “if you’re promoting how to sell or grow tomatoes” and the traffic you pulled in was actually looking for something to do with sports. Retargeting a mismatched audience doesn’t fix bad targeting, it just repeats it, over and over, on your dime.

The fix is sequencing, not a different tool:

• Get your initial traffic targeted correctly first, before you ever think about retargeting it.
• Build your audience only from people who actually landed on a page relevant to what you’re selling.
• Name each audience clearly if you’re running more than one offer, so you never mix pools by accident.

None of this requires a developer or a big budget. It requires doing the setup once, correctly, on traffic that was already worth pursuing. Get that order right and the pixel does the rest quietly in the background from that point forward.

What makes this lesson worth sitting through slowly is how little separates a marketer running a smart retargeting audience from one quietly burning money on the wrong crowd. It’s not tool sophistication. It’s whether the traffic feeding that audience was targeted in the first place. Fix that one upstream decision and everything downstream, the pixel, the pool, the ads following people around the internet, actually earns its keep instead of just running up a bill.

Once the audience exists and the pixel is live, the next thing worth nailing down is removing people from that pool the moment they’ve already taken the action you wanted, so you’re not still chasing someone who already said yes.

The full session shows the rest of the SiteScout campaign build, including the conversion tracking that comes next. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

All right, so what I’ve done here is logged into my Site Scout demo account so I can show you some of this stuff, all right? If you don’t have an account with Site Scout, I want you to, well, you don’t have to do nothing, right, what I’m telling you here, but it would be useful. It would be useful for you to maybe sign up for an account. Again, it’s free, right? Just go to Site Scout comm, create yourself a free account if you don’t already have it, and, and then just go ahead and log into your account, all right? When you log into your account, you will go to tools, okay? That’s what I did. I just wanted tools. Click on new campaign, all right? When you click on new campaign, you will see a screen that will look similar to this one right over here.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff here. Don’t let this stuff confuse you, first of all, first of all, all right? What I’m going to show you here is the, some of the basic stuff. You’re going to see a lot of stuff here. Don’t let this stuff confuse you first, okay? When it comes to, you know, setting up your campaign, you can, you can take this information, you can apply it right now, and you can get your first campaign off the ground, you know, as you watching this video. Make sense? Now, if you have any questions, and you can always contact their support, okay? You can actually call them up. There’s a phone number. You can call them up, you can say, hey, I’m having an issue here, I’m having an issue here, okay? This particular module is not designed to be super advanced, okay? Just because I don’t want to confuse you. Make sense? Now, we will be getting into some of the deeper stuff later on, okay? Round two, round three, that kind of stuff, okay? I will let you know. So again, the intention here is to show you how it’s done, all right? Go ahead and jump and start doing this. Get your feet wet with this kind of stuff, okay? It’s actually not difficult. Listen, don’t over complicate a simple thing, okay?

Now, sometimes, you know, when you look at something that you haven’t seen before, you know, it may look like, well, it’s confusing, right? Well, there’s so many stuff here. There’s like campaign basic, and there is traffic sources, and there’s creatives, and there is, you know, geo targeting, there is, you know, retargeting, daily day partying, all that good stuff, right? You’re right, contextual targeting. What the heck is all that mean? Do I need to know everything? Oh my god, my head is gonna be explode. Don’t worry about it, man. Just chill, you know, just, just take it easy. What we’re gonna be working with you, and there is actually like three different tabs we’re gonna be working with here. That’s campaign basics. This is where you set up your campaign and create your marketing campaign, okay? You’re gonna name your campaign, all that good stuff, you know, where do you want the traffic to be redirected to, you know, self-explanatory stuff. Traffic sources, okay? We’re going to be working with that. We’re gonna be working with the creatives, which I’m going to show you in the next video. This is where you actually load up your, your banners that will be served, you know, all that stuff, okay? And then we’re gonna be working with retargeting. That’s it, okay?

In fact, right now, step number one and setting up your campaign is, order for us to start building our audiences, okay? In order for us to start creating that little cloud that I showed you in video number one of this module. Remember that, right? To where you will be capturing people into that cloud, okay? That you, that later you will be following around on the internet, okay? Because you only follow people that have, you know, visited your site, okay? At least once. No sense, as soon, as long as they visited your site, boom, they are targeted and you following them around.

So that’s why it’s important, you know, for you to, when you’re running your campaigns with other traffic methods, make sure that you are targeting correctly, okay? Because if you, let’s say, if you do a PPV campaign, for example, right, you know, pay-per-view marketing, and you, and you target a whole bunch of like non targeted people, right? Let’s say if you, you know, if you’re promoting how to sell or grow tomatoes, and, and you just ended up, you know, targeting people, and you’re following them around. So that’s why it’s important to know that you’re targeting people. You know, you didn’t really target your campaign, and, and you, you ended up going after folks who are looking for, you know, for, you know, things that have to do with like sports or something like that, right? Like totally off the wall, totally unrelated, you know, audience, right? Well, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna retarget them with, you know, with your tomato stuff, obviously they’re not gonna be interested. Make sense? So make sure that you are targeting, you know, your, your initial traffic comes to your site, comes from targeted sources, okay?

If you get that taken care of, you have targeted traffic coming to your site, and then you have this retargeting being attached to your site, so to speak, right? Man, you can do so much good stuff. It’s unbelievable what you can accomplish. And man, oh man, you can build your business too. You can take a business to an unbelievable heights, and this is all not that difficult.

So what we’re gonna do, step number one, is we’re gonna build our audiences. We’re gonna click on retargeting over here, okay? See this, retargeting, okay? We’re gonna click on create new audience right over here, okay? We’re gonna go on the right, we’re gonna click on create, all right? See this here, boom, this little thing pops up here. We’re gonna name our audience, our retargeting list. This will be the list of people that we’re gonna be following on the Internet, okay? Based on whatever you, or you want to promote. So yes, you can be promoting multiple things, and you can be following multiple crowds of people all at the same time, all right? Simultaneously. Does that make sense? So, you know, for this particular example, I don’t want to show you exactly what to promote or whatever. I just wanted to keep it very generic, okay? You’re gonna tweak it to whatever it is that you’re promoting, okay? I’m gonna say ITF demo, okay?

Um, so you’ll click on save, no, save, boom. Now, see that ITF demo over here? You’re gonna click on it, okay? You actually just, just highlight it, okay? I’m just gonna highlight it, and then, it’s very important, okay, make sure that you highlight the list that you want to retarget, okay? That you want to build. In my, in my example, it’s ITF demo. I just created it, right? Highlight it. You’ll go on the right, click where it says get tags. See that? See how simple it is? Get tags. And then you will, you know, you will select the recommended one here, script. Now, this is your pixel. This is your tracking code, all right? You’re gonna copy this whole thing right here, okay? You’re gonna copy this thing. Don’t worry about the, all the jibber jibber etha, all this, all this, all this stuff over here. I have no idea what, you know, well, all this stuff stands for. But all I know is, you know what, at the end of the day, this thing is gonna work like champ for me, and that’s what I want, all right? That’s what you want to. So just copy it, okay? Very, very simple. Copy.

And then you’re gonna place this, very important now, check this out, okay? I’m not gonna show you how to do this, because I don’t have no idea what you’re promoting. I have no idea how yours, you know, how your system is set up, or what are you doing, okay? The concept is this. You’re gonna take this code, okay, and you’re gonna place it on the page where people being redirected to you when you are promoting the page, okay? So whatever page that you promoting, in most cases, is going to be your landing page, okay? So where does the traffic go to? What’s the page that traffic is going to? Like when you’re promoting on Facebook, when you’re promoting and getting traffic, you know, to whatever it is that you’re promoting, what page do you promote? Okay, it should be your landing page, okay? So you will place this code on your landing page. Make sense? So that when people, when people hit your landing page, okay, they will be cook it in, okay? They’ll, they’ll be, they’ll get a cookie placed in there, you know, in their browser. And then that cookie is going to follow them everywhere else they go, and they’ll display, and that cookie is gonna display your ad for that particular person. Make sense? Okay.

You say, Vic, how do I place this code onto my landing page? Well, if you created a landing page using like a, you know, whatever, right, megaphone or, or, you know, ELPP or leadpages.net, okay, there is gonna be a little area in the setup, usually, okay, to where it’s gonna allow you to add tracking codes or tracking pixels. Well, that’s where you add, that’s where you paste this code to, okay? Gonna paste it in, I’m gonna click on save. Or if you have a, you know, designer do it for you, just make sure the code is being placed right before the close of the HTML, in the, in the body, okay, of that, of that page, okay? And that’s what you’re gonna do for step number one, okay? So that when, when people are, you know, hitting that page, they’ll be able to, this code is gonna fire off, and it’s gonna put a pixel, it was gonna put a, you know, a little cookie on there, on that visitors browser, okay? And then the rest of the trick is gonna happen in video number whatever that number is after this one, okay? So I’m gonna show you how to do the rest of the setup in the next video.