The Second Pixel That Stops Retargeting Someone Who Already Said Yes

Say your retargeting pool is working exactly as designed. Someone hits your landing page, doesn’t opt in right away, gets followed around the internet by your ad for a few days, then finally comes back and subscribes. Job done, right? Except if nothing else changes, that same person keeps seeing the exact same ad, for the exact same offer, indefinitely. Vic Strizheus uses this lesson to close that gap: how to make a retargeting pool smart enough to stop chasing someone the moment they’ve already said yes.

What happens the moment someone finally does what you wanted?

Without a second step, nothing changes on your end. The person who opted in still shows up in the same retargeting audience as everyone who hasn’t. You keep paying to display ads to them, and they keep seeing an offer for something they already took action on. That’s wasted spend on one side and, on the other, an experience that starts to feel less like relevant advertising and more like being followed by a company that isn’t paying attention.

why would you wanna spend money on somebody that’s already taken action

That’s the question Vic Strizheus poses directly, and it’s the entire justification for the fix. The mechanics of it are simple: you build a second tracking pixel, a conversion pixel, and place it on the page people see right after they take the action you wanted, the thank you page that loads after an opt-in, or after a sale.

How do you actually build that second pixel?

Inside SiteScout, under Tools, there’s a separate section for conversion pixels, distinct from the audience-building pixel from the last lesson. You create a new one, name the specific action it represents (an opt-in for a particular offer, for instance), and SiteScout hands you a short script to place on the corresponding thank you page. If that page happens to sit behind a secure checkout, you select the secure version of the tag; otherwise the standard one works fine.

Once that code is live, the system does the rest automatically. The moment someone lands on the thank you page, SiteScout recognizes that this specific visitor already completed the action, and removes them from the retargeting audience tied to it. No manual list management, no spreadsheet, no going in and pruning names by hand.

It’s a small piece of engineering, one script pasted in one field, but it changes the character of the whole campaign. Instead of a static list you built once and forgot about, the audience becomes a living thing that shrinks as people convert and grows as new visitors arrive, staying accurate without you touching it again.

Does this only work for opt-ins?

Vic Strizheus is clear that the same mechanism scales to any stage of a funnel, not just the first opt-in. As he puts it, “You can retarget people who are your customers,” following up to move them toward an upsell, a coaching program, or whatever the next offer actually is. The exclusion pixel works the same way at every level. Wherever there’s an action worth removing someone for, there’s a thank you page you can attach that removal to.

A few things worth locking in from this lesson:

• Every conversion point in your funnel can get its own named pixel and its own removal rule.
• The conversion pixel always lives on the page after the action, never on the page before it.
• If there’s genuinely no thank you page to place it on, the pool just keeps running without the automatic cleanup, which is a real cost worth fixing if you can.

Get this piece right and the whole system stops treating every visitor the same. People who haven’t acted keep seeing your ad. People who have, don’t. That distinction alone is what turns a retargeting pool from a blunt instrument into something that actually respects where each person is in your funnel.

It’s also the kind of detail that separates a campaign someone set up once and never revisited from one that’s actually being run like a business. The pixel from the earlier lesson gets people in. This one decides, moment to moment, who deserves to stay.

The full session walks through the rest of the campaign build, including budget and targeting settings. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

All right, so how's everything going? You good? Now, in the last video, we created a way for us to build an audience, right? For us to retarget people or actually get them to our little cloud that we're gonna retarget them from.

Does that make sense? So what happens when somebody that you're retargeting, what if they take action that you want them to take? So for example, if you're retargeting them and you want them to, you keep sending them back to your landing page for them to opt in, okay? Well, what if they opted in?

You need to remove them from that retargeting circle, right, from that cloud for a couple of reasons. Number one is you don't want to show your ads to somebody who has already taken action on what you wanted them to take action on. Does that make sense? So otherwise, it's just gonna be annoying for people.

Number two is why would you wanna spend money on somebody that's already taken action that you wanted them to take? Does that make sense? So we need to set, in our SiteScout, in our campaign, we need to set up a way so that it would automatically remove them from the retargeting list as soon as they take the action that you want them to take, okay? Now, I'm just gonna assume that you're gonna be retargeting people for opt-ins, but you can also retarget people for pretty much anything.

You can be sending them back to your sales page. You can be retargeting your opt-ins, right? And just follow them, follow them around until they buy. You can retarget people who are your customers, and maybe you want them to take an upsell or something like that.

Maybe you want them to get to the next level in your training or coaching or whatever it is that you're doing out there. You can set up retargeting on different levels of your business. Does that make sense? Which is really, really awesome.

So when somebody took an action that you wanted them to take, when you were retargeting them, okay, whether they opted in, whether they purchased or whatever, you need to remove them from that list. And to do that, we need to create another pixel. We need to create another tracking code that we're gonna place on our thank you page, okay? To do that, it's very, very simple.

We're gonna go to tools. We're gonna click on offers conversions pixels, okay? It's gonna take us right over here. And then on the right-hand corner here, we're gonna click on create.

Okay, very, very simple. You're gonna name your action. So what is this conversion going to be for? Let's say ITF opt-in, okay?

So let's say if I'm retargeting people for internet traffic formula, if I was to sell the internet traffic formula, of course, right, then I would retarget people back to the… you know, bringing them back to my landing page. And when they would opt-in, I would need to remove them, okay? Now, because they opted-in, and there is no particular dollar amount that I will be earning, you know, from that opt-in, so I don't really care.

Like if you are, you know, if I was to promote, let's say a CPA offer or something like that, right? Then I would put, you know, a value here, how much I'm getting for every email submit or something like that, right? So basically, just name it, you click on save, it will give you over here, see that ITF opt-in, okay? You're gonna highlight it.

This is, you know, a tracking that we just created, right? Conversion tracking we just created here. And we're gonna highlight this. We're gonna click on get tags, all right?

Get tags, and then conversion pixels is what you need, okay? And by default, it's gonna show you secure SSL. Now, if you are going to place this, okay, it's on like a checkout page or something like that, on the secure page, you know, you would obviously, you know, select the secure SSL. In my case, it's gonna be non-secure because the page is non-secure and I don't really, you know, I don't really need the secured ones in here.

So I'll just select this, all right? You're gonna copy this little line of code, all right? And you will place this not on your landing page anymore. You're going to place this on your thank you page, okay?

Where do people get redirected to after they have taken an action, you know, the kind of action that you wanted them to take? So if you are retargeting them, you know, based on your landing page, right, and you're bringing them back to your landing page, well, as soon as they opted in to that landing page, where do they get redirected to? Well, that page that they get redirected to after they opted in, that's your thank you page. Make sense?

And I know I'm being very, very simplistic here, but I wanna make sure that you understand, and everybody understands this. So you would place this code on your thank you page. So what happens is, you know, the system, SiteScout, their network would track that person, okay, their activity, and then as soon as they, you know, come across, as soon as the system comes across this code, it knows that that person has already opted in, and it would automatically remove them from the retargeting list of audience that you're following around, okay?

And then you will not have to, you know, display your ads to the person who has already opted in. Okay? So it's very important for you to, you know, set this up. If there is no possible way for you to, for you to place this on a thank you page, then of course, you know, you don't really need to do this.

You'll just be retargeting people, you know, continue to retargeting them. But, you know, if you are able to place this on a thank you page, I would recommend that you do that right now, okay? And then in the next video, we're gonna proceed with setting up the rest of this campaign.