“Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your cookied visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited your site.”

Essentially, retargeting ads allow you to show ads to people who have visited your website at some point in the recent past. You can show retargeting ads across the web using Google’s display network, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

While many small businesses have caught on to the effectiveness of retargeting ads, there are many ways to use these types of ads to drive tangible business growth.

Here’s a quick list of 4 ways you can use retargeting ads to grow your business.

1. Maximize e-commerce sales

Most online shoppers will visit a website multiple times before making a purchase. Lots of people will go through the checkout process, abandon their cart and never make a purchase. If you aren’t running retargeting ads for your online business, then you are missing out on getting sales from these “almost” customers.

Retargeting ads are a great way to gently remind people about your company and products. You can also promote special discounts to incentivize people to come back to your site and make a purchase. In these scenarios, you can expect a very high ROI from retargeting ads.

2. Direct traffic to landing pages

Depending on the type of business you own, your website may have key conversion pages that you really want to promote. By using retargeting ads, you can take anyone who has been to your site and send them to specific pages you want them to see. This is a cheap and effective way to direct previous site’s visitors to fresh new content and offers.

3. Grow your Facebook fan page

Building a Facebook presence can be vital to the success of your company. The biggest complaint I hear from business owners is about Facebook’s diminishing returns. They don’t want to pay a ton of money to increase their following and then pay even more to talk to them.

From my experience, a cheap and effective way to build your Facebook audience and increase engagement with is through retargeting ads. Through Facebook’s custom audience feature, you can show Facebook ads to people who have visited your site before.

Because you are only targeting people who have visited your site before, you are not placing your ad in front of anyone who isn’t already familiar with your brand. For this reason, the cost per “Like” or engagement will be much lower than any other type of campaign.

4. Gain Twitter and Instagram followers

Just like with Facebook, you can retarget past site visitors on both Twitter and Instagram to increase your following and engagement on those platforms. If either platform is important for business growth, then these types of ads are generally much cheaper and have a better ROI than others ad types. The only downside is that they require that you have good traffic to your site first.

This article has been edited and condensed.

Joe Auer, founder of JAKK Media, is a digital media and marketing entrepreneur. He runs several large media websites and is based out of New York City. Connect with @joeauer84 on Twitter.

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