cookies policy

Cookies in Use on This Site

Cookies and How They Benefit You

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them from AllAboutCookies.org.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information, without your express permission
  • Collect any sensitive information
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

Granting us Permission to use Cookies

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you want to gain the benefits that come from using cookies. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

More about our Cookies

Website Function Cookies

Our own Cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Remembering your search settings

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third Party Functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Our site includes the following which use cookies:

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before helping us to put more money into developing our services for you instead of marketing spend.

We use:

We also use technology to determine how people who phone us arrived on our website (e.g. from a search engine or by clicking on an advert). This is to help us to identify how people heard about us. Please be aware that if you call us, using a phone number on the website we can potentially tell how you arrived on our website. Again this ultimately helps us keep down costs for you.

We use: Google Analytics – Google Analytics Terms of Service

Google Cookies

Cookie NameDefault Expiration TimeDescription
__utma2 years from set/updateUsed to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utma cookies exists. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmt10 minutesUsed to throttle request rate.
__utmb30 mins from set/updateUsed to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utmb cookies exists. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmcEnd of browser sessionNot used in ga.js. Set for interoperability with urchin.js. Historically, this cookie operated in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine whether the user was in a new session/visit.
__utmz6 months from set/updateStores the traffic source or campaign that explains how the user reached your site. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmv2 years from set/updateUsed to store visitor-level custom variable data. This cookie is created when a developer uses the _setCustomVar method with a visitor level custom variable. This cookie was also used for the deprecated _setVar method. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.

 

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites. Please note that by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies you may not be able to access certain areas or features of our site.

It may be that you have concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.

27/04/2018