Cookie & Privacy Policy

Cookie Policy:

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small files which are stored on your computer. They are designed to hold a modest amount of data specific to your website visit on our site.

Cookies help to improve your visit to our website by helping with the following:

  • Remembering settings, so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you visit a new page
  • Remembering information you’ve given (e.g. your postcode) so you don’t need to keep entering it
  • Measuring how you use the website so we can make sure it meets your needs

Please note that cookies can’t harm your computer and we do not store personally identifiable information in cookies we use on this website.

We’re giving you this information as part of our initiative to comply with UK legislation, and to make sure we’re honest and clear about your privacy when using our website.

Please be assured that we’re working on a number of other privacy and cookie-related improvements to the website.

The Cookies we use:

General website cookies

This website is built using PHP web technologies, as part of that we use the built in session cookie and handler ($_SESSION) to manage your session. When you navigate to the site, the server establishes a unique session that last for the duration of your visit.

Measuring website usage – Google Analytics

Google Analytics uses cookies to define user sessions, as well as to provide a number of key features in the Google Analytics reports. Google Analytics sets or updates cookies only to collect data required for the reports. Additionally, Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies. This means that all cookies set by Google Analytics for your domain send data only to the servers for your domain. This effectively makes Google Analytics cookies the personal property of this website domain, and the data cannot be altered or retrieved by any service on another domain.

The following table lists the type of information that is obtained via Google Analytics cookies and used in Analytics reports.

Functionality

Description of Cookie

Cookie Used

Setting the Scope of Your Site Content

Because any cookie read/write access is restricted by a combination of the cookie name and its domain, default visitor tracking via Google Analytics is confined to the domain of the page on which the tracking code is installed. For the most common scenario where the tracking code is installed on a single domain (and no other sub-domains), the generic setup is correct. In other situations where you wish to track content across domains or sub-domains, or restrict tracking to a smaller section of a single domain, you use additional methods in the ga.jstracking code to define content scope. See Domains & Directories in the Collection API document for details.

All Cookies

Determining Visitor Session

The Google Analytics tracking for ga.jsuses two cookies to establish a session. If either of these two cookies are absent, further activity by the user initiates the start of a new session. See the Sessionarticle in the Help Center for a detailed definition and a list of scenarios that end a session. You can customize the length of the default session time using the _setSessionCookieTimeout() method.

This description is specific to the ga.js tracking code for web pages. If you use Analytics tracking for other environments—such as Flash or mobile—you should check the documentation for those environments to learn how sessions are calculated or established.

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Identifying Unique Visitors

Each unique browser that visits a page on your site is provided with a unique ID via the __utma cookie. In this way, subsequent visits to your website via the same browser are recorded as belonging to the same (unique) visitor. Thus, if a person interacted with your website using both Firefox and Internet Explorer, the Analytics reports would track this activity under two unique visitors. Similarly if the same browser were used by two different visitors, but with a separate computer account for each, the activity would be recorded under two unique visitor IDs. On the other hand, if the browser happens to be used by two different people sharing the same computer account, one unique visitor ID is recorded, even though two unique individuals accessed the site.

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Tracking Traffic Sources & Navigation

When visitors reach your site via a search engine result, a direct link, or an ad that links to your page, Google Analytics stores the type of referral information in a cookie. The parameters in the cookie value string are parsed and sent in the GIF Request (in the utmccvariable). The expiration date for the cookie is set as 6 months into the future. This cookie gets updated with each subsequent page view to your site; thus it is used to determine visitor navigation within your site.

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Custom Variables

You can define your own segments for reporting on your particular data. When you use the _setCustomVar() method in your tracking code to define custom variables, Google Analytics uses this cookie to track and report on that information. In a typical use case, you might use this method to segment your website visitors by a custom demographic that they select on your website (income, age range, product preferences).

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Website Optimizer

You can use Google Analytics with Google Website Optimizer (GWO), which is a tool that helps determine the most effective design for your site. When a website optimizer script executes on your page, a _utmx cookie is written to the browser and its value is sent to Google Analytics. See the Website Optimizer Help Center for more information.

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