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.
How are cookies used on this site
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 don’t use cookies to
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
- Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
- 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 are fine with this. 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.
Website Function Cookies
Our own cookies
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Third party functions
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.
Anonymous 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, on an anonymous basis, 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 Google Analytics for our visitor statistics. You can read which cookies Google Analytics uses on the Google Developer site.
Google Analytics Tracking Cookies
| Cookie Name | Expiration Time | Description |
|---|---|---|
_ga_* |
2 years | Used by Google Analytics to collect data on the number of times a user has visited the website as well as dates for the first and most recent visit. |
_ga |
2 years—– | Used to distinguish users. |
_gat |
10 minutes | Used to throttle request rate. |
__utma |
2 years from set/update | Used 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. |
__utmt |
10 minutes | Used to throttle request rate. |
__utmb |
30 mins from set/update | Used 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. |
__utmc |
End of browser session | Not 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. |
__utmz |
6 months from set/update | Stores 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. |
__utmv |
2 years from set/update | Used 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 ours and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
It may be that your 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.
