Cookie Policy
Information about our use of cookies
Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.
We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, use a shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
- Analytical/performance cookies. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
- Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region).
- Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:
Google Cookies
All other cookies on our website relate to Google Analytics which we use to monitor how many visitors we have to our website, and to DoubleClick which is Google’s advertising platform. We us Google Adwords to advertise our website on Google and cookies are required for us to record when people click on those ads and what they do on our website.
The cookies are as follows. These descriptions are taken from Google’s information at developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage and www.google.com/policies/technologies/types . These pages contain more detailed information.
Google’s cookies each have different expiry settings which are listed below, along with their expiry settings.
__utma
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.
Expiry: 2 years from set/update
__utmz
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.
Expiry: 6 months from set/update
_ga
Used to distinguish users
Expiry: 2 years
_gat
Used to throttle request rate
Expiry: 1 minute
AID
Used to link your activity across devices if you’ve previously signed in to your Google Account on another device. Google’s information about this cookie is as follows (correct as at 28 November 2017)
_gid
Used to distinguish users
Expiry: 24 hours
We also use cookies named ‘AID,‘ ‘DSID,’ and ‘TAID‘, which are used to link your activity across devices if you’ve previously signed in to your Google Account on another device. We do this to coordinate the ads you see across devices and measure conversion events. These cookies may be set on the domains google.com/ads, google.com/ads/measurement, or googleadservices.com. If you don’t want the ads you see to be coordinated across your devices, you can opt out of Ads Personalization using Ads Settings.
The link to Google’s ‘Ads Settings’ is www.google.com/settings/ads?hl=en
Please note that other third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies. You block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.