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
Our cookies help us:
- Make our website work as you’d expect
- Remember your settings during and between visits
- Offer you free services/content (thanks to advertising)
- Improve the speed/security of the site
- 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 (without your express permission)
- 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.
More about our Cookies
Website Function Cookies
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Remembering your search settings
- Allowing you to add comments to our site
- Allowing you to accept cookes once per month
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:
- YouTube & Vimeo powers the videos on our site
Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties
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:
- Google Analytics
- AWStats
- AddThis for tracking Social Bookmarking
Advertising Cookies
Cookies are widely used in online advertising. Neither us, advertisers or our advertising partners can gain personally identifiable information from these cookies. We only work with advertising partners who work to accepted privacy standards such as www.youronlinechoices.com/
You can learn more about online advertising at www.youronlinechoices.com . You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices although we would prefer that you didn’t as ultimately adverts help keep much of the internet free. It is also worth noting that opting out of advertising cookies will not mean you won’t see adverts, just simply that they won’t be tailored to you any longer.
We use:
- DoubleClick owned by Google
Banner Adverts
We fund our site by showing adverts as you browse our site. These adverts are usually managed by a partner specialising in providing adverts for multiple sites. Invariably these partners place cookies to collect anonymous data about the websites you visits so they can personalise the adverts to you, ensure that you don’t see the same adverts too frequently and ultimately report to advertisers on which adverts are working.
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how here). Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our’s and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites
It may be that you 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. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software.
The cookie information text on this site was derived from content provided by Attacat Internet Marketing ( attacat.co.uk ), a marketing agency based in Edinburgh. If you need similar information for your own website you can use their free cookie audit tool.
| Cookie | Description | Duration | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| __utma | This cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics. | 2 years | Performance |
| __utmc | The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is deleted when the user closes the browser. The cookie is not used by ga.js. The cookie is used to enable interoperability with urchin.js which is an older version of Google analytics and used in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine new sessions/visits. | Performance | |
| __utmz | This cookie is set by Google analytics and is used to store the traffic source or campaign through which the visitor reached your site. | 5 months | Performance |
| __utmt | The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to throttle request rate. | 10 minutes | Performance |
| __utmb | The cookie is set by Google Analytics. The cookie is used to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics. | 30 minutes | Performance |
| __atuvc | This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated. | 1 year | Functional |
| __atuvs | This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated. | 30 minutes | Functional |
| test_cookie | This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the users’ browser supports cookies. | 15 minutes | Advertisement |
| uvc | The cookie is set by addthis.com to determine the usage of Addthis.com service. | 1 year | Analytics |
| loc | This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located. | 1 year | Advertisement |