COOKIE POLICY – Effective 25th October 2021

What’s a cookie?

  • A “cookie” is a piece of information that is stored on your computer’s hard drive and which records how you move your way around a website so that, when you revisit that website, it can present tailored options based on the information stored about your last visit. Cookies can also be used to analyse traffic and for advertising and marketing purposes.
  • Cookies are used by nearly all websites and do not harm your system.

If you want to check or change what types of cookies you accept, this can usually be altered within your browser settings. You can block cookies at any time by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. By not blocking cookies and continuing to browse you are authorising the use of cookies. 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.

How do we use cookies?

  • We use cookies to track your use of our website. This enables us to understand how you use the site and track any patterns with regards how you are using our website. This helps us to develop and improve our website as well as products and / or services in response to what you might need or want.
  • Cookies are either:

– Session cookies: these are only stored on your computer during your web session and are automatically deleted when you close your browser – they usually store an anonymous session ID allowing you to browse a website without having to log in to each page but they do not collect any personal data from your computer; or

– Persistent cookies: a persistent cookie is stored as a file on your computer and it remains there when you close your web browser. The cookie can be read by the website that created it when you visit that website again. [We use persistent cookies for Google Analytics.]

  • Cookies can also be categorised as follows:

– Strictly necessary cookies: These cookies are essential to enable you to use the website effectively, such as when buying a product and / or service, and therefore cannot be turned off. Without these cookies, the services available to you on our website cannot be provided. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you have been on the internet.

– Performance cookies: These cookies enable us to monitor and improve the performance of our website. For example, they allow us to count visits, identify traffic sources and see which parts of the site are most popular.

– Functionality cookies: These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make and provide enhanced features. For instance, we may be able to provide you with news or updates relevant to the services you use. They may also be used to provide services you have requested such as viewing a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect is usually anonymised.

What cookies are set by visiting our site?

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.

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.

Site Improvement Cookies
We regularly test new designs or site features on our site. We do this by showing slightly different versions of our website to different people and anonymously monitoring how our site visitors respond to these different versions. Ultimately this helps us to offer you a better website.

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.

Remarketing Cookies
You may notice that sometimes after visiting a site you see increased numbers of adverts from the site you visited. This is because advertisers, including ourselves pay for these adverts. The technology to do this is made possible by cookies and as such we may place a so called “remarketing cookie” during your visit. We use these adverts to offer special offers etc to encourage you to come back to our site. Don’t worry we are unable to proactively reach out to you as the whole process is entirely anonymised. You can opt out of these cookies at anytime.

Affiliate Cookies
We have a number of partners who promote our service on a success-only basis (i.e. instead of paying for advertising, we pay them commissions on sales). Cookies are required to allow us to reward these partners and these cookies are usually provided by specialist companies (known as affiliate networks). Neither us, the networks, or the partner advertising or recommending our services are able to identify you personally. We ask you to support us by allowing these cookies which ultimately help us to offer you the service we do at the price we do.

Email Newsletter Cookies
This site offers newsletter or email subscription services and cookies may be used to remember if you are already registered and whether to show certain notifications which might only be valid to subscribed/unsubscribed users.

How to control cookies?

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish – for details, see aboutcookies.org. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work.

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