Cookie Policy

Contents

• About cookies
• Types of cookies used
• Non-essential cookies
• How to accept or reject cookies
• Copyright, credit and logo

About cookies

What are cookies?

Cookies are small data files sent by a website’s server to a web browser, processor memory or hard drive and stored there. They can be used for a range of different purposes, such as customising a website for a particular user, helping a user navigate a website, improving that user’s website experience, and storing that user’s preferences and login information.

Essential and non-essential cookies

Cookies can be classified as either ‘essential’ or ‘non-essential’.

Essential cookies: these are cookies that are either:

• used solely to carry out or facilitate the transmission of communications over a network; or
• strictly necessary to provide an online service (e.g. our website or a service on our website) which you have requested.

Non-essential cookies: these are any cookies that do not fall within the definition of essential cookies, such as cookies used to analyse your behaviour on a website (‘analytical’ cookies) or cookies used to display advertisements to you (‘advertising’ cookies).

Session and persistent cookies

Cookies can be classified as either ‘session’ or ‘persistent’, depending on how long they last after they are placed on your browser.

Session cookies: session cookies last for as long as you keep your browser open. They expire when you close your browser.

Persistent cookies: persistent cookies expire at a fixed point in time or if you manually delete them from your browser, whichever occurs first.

First and third party cookies

Cookies can be classified as ‘first party’ or ‘third party’.

First party cookies: these are cookies placed on your device by our website domain.

Third party cookies: these are cookies placed on your device by third party website domains.

If you require further information about cookies in general, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org

Types of cookies used

We use the following cookies on or in relation to our website:

Name of Cookie	Essential or Non-essential?	Type of cookie	First or Third party?	Session or Persistent?	Expiry Time	Purpose
Smartlookcookie	Non-essential	Functional	Third party	Session	End of browser session	Relates to live chat programme theme being used on website
Smartlookcookie	Non-essential	Functional	Third party	Session	End of browser session	Relates to live chat programme theme being used on website
ssupp.chatid	Non-essential	Functional	First party	Session	End of browser session	Registers user ID to provide live chat service
ssupp.vid	Non-essential	Functional	First party	Persistent	179 days	Relates to premium feature to allow video chat on live chat service.
_utm.gif	Non-essential	Analytical	First party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics Tracking Code that logs details about the visitor’s browser and computer
_utma	Non-essential	Analytical	First party	Persistent	2 years	Google Analytics cookie that collects data on the number of times a user has visited the website as well as dates for the first and most recent visit.
_utmb	Non-essential	Analytical	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics cookie used to register a timestamp with the exact time of when the user accessed the website. Calculates the duration of a website visit.
_utmc	Non-essential	Analytical	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics cookie used to register a timestamp with the exact time of when the user accessed the website. Calculates the duration of a website visit.
_utmt	Non-essential	Load Balancing	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics cookies used to throttle the speed of requests to the website’s server.
_utmv	Non-essential	Analytical	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics cookie which Save user-defined parameters for use in Google Analytics.
_utmz	Non-essential	Analytical	First Party	Persistent	6 months	Google Analytics cookie which collects data on where the user came from, what search engine was used, what link was clicked and what search terms was used.
_ga	Non-essential	Analytical	First Party	Persistent	2 years	Google Analytics cookie which registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
_gat	Non-essential	Load Balancing	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics cookie used to throttle request rate
_gid	Non-essential	Analytical	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Google Analytics cookie that registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
_hjIncludedInSample	Non-essential	Targeting (Advertising)	First Party	Session	End of browser session	Hotjar cookie used to determines if the user’s navigation should be registered in report of how visitors have used our website.

Non-essential cookies

We use the following types of non-essential cookies on our website:

• Functional cookies
• Analytical (or performance) cookies
• Targeting (or advertising) cookies

Functional cookies

These are cookies that are designed for purposes such as enhancing a website’s functionality. These are either not strictly essential for the website or functionality which you have requested to work, or are cookies which serve non-essential purposes in addition to their essential purpose. We use the following functional cookies on our website:

First and third party session and persistent cookies to provide our live chat service and related functionality. These cookies are two third party session smarklookcookies which relate the our live chat’s theme to ensure it display correctly to users, a session cookie called chatid to allow the service to recognise a particular user and suppvid, a persistent cookie expiring after 179 days that relates to a premium feature of our live chat service.

How to opt in or out from functional cookies

See the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies

Processing information about you contained in or obtained from functional cookies

Legal basis for processing: we process information about you contained in or obtained from functional cookies in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation). We will only process such personal information if you have consented to us placing cookies on your computer or device.
Legitimate interests: improving your website experience, providing or enhancing the appearance and functionality of our live chat service.

Analytical (or performance) cookies

Analytical (or performance) cookies track and gather data about what a user does on a website. These cookies are not essential for our website or its functionality to work. We use the following analytical cookies on our website:

We use Google Analytics cookies on our website. Google Analytics cookies help us understand how you engage and interact with our website, including how you came to our website, which pages you visited, for how long and what you clicked on, your location (based on your IP address).

The Google Analytics cookies used on our website are: _utm.gif, _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmt, _utmv, _utmz, _ga, _gat and _gid. These cookies include session and persistent cookies. For further details on these cookies, please see the table in the section above entitled List of cookies used.

We also use a cookie called _hjincludedInSample which is used to determine whether a user’s activity should be included in a statistical report of how users have visited our website (for us to analyse), called a ‘funnel’. Hotjar analyses your behaviour on our website using a tracking code and allows us to generate ‘heatmaps’ (visual representations of user mouse behaviour) which help us analyse visitor behaviour on our site.

More information

Google Analytics cookies are classified as first party cookies as they are set by our website domain, although Google collects and processes information from our use of Google Analytics. To find out more about how Google handles information collected from Google Analytics, see Google Analytics’ privacy policy, which is available here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245

For information on how Google uses data from cookies it uses, please visit www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.

You can find our more about Hotjar funnels here: https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en-us/articles/115011656407-How-do-Hotjar-Funnels-Work-. For more information on how Hotjar handles information collected by cookies and what information they collect, please see their privacy policy here: https://www.hotjar.com/privacy

How to opt in or out from analytical cookies

See the section below entitled How to accept or reject cookies

To opt out of Google Analytics tracking across all websites in general, you can do so here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Processing information about you contained in or obtained from analytical cookies

Legal basis for processing: we process information about you contained in or obtained from analytical cookies in our legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation).
Legitimate interests: analysing how individuals use our website to help us improve our website and business. For further information on how we use the information gathered from our use of analytical cookies, including profiling, please see the section entitled Our use of automated decision making and profiling in our privacy policy, which is available here: /privacy/

More information

For information about the cookies Google uses in relation to the above, see the ‘Advertising’ section on the Types of cookies used by Google page in Google’s cookies policy, which is available here: https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/types/

For information about how Google uses data from cookies for its own purposes, please visit the following link www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/

How to accept or reject cookies

There are a number of different ways in which you can accept or reject some or all cookies. Some of the main methods of doing so are described below:

You are welcome to block the use of some or all of the cookies we use on our website. However, please be aware that doing so may impair our website and its functionality or may even render some or all of it unusable.

You should also be aware that clearing all cookies from your browser will also delete any cookies that are storing your preferences, for example, whether you have accepted cookies on a website or any cookies that are blocking other cookies.

You can find more detailed information about cookies and adjusting your browser settings by visiting www.allaboutcookies.org

Accepting or rejecting cookies

Cookie control tool

You can accept or reject non-essential cookies by using our cookie management tool by turning off and on the types of non-essential cookies you would like to accept or reject using the sliders in our cookie banner.

Browser settings

You can accept or reject some or all cookies (for example, blocking all third party cookies) by adjusting your browser settings. If you do not know how to do this, the links below set out information about how to change your browser settings for some of the most commonly used web browsers:

Google Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?hl=en-GB
Mozilla Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/delete-browsing-search-download-history-firefox?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=Clear+Recent+History
Microsoft Internet Explorer: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/278835/how-to-delete-cookie-files-in-internet-explorer
Apple Safari: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH5042?locale=en_US
Some browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox, allow you to change your settings to browse in ‘incognito’ mode, limiting the amount of data placed on your machine and automatically deleting any persistent cookies placed on your device when you finish your browsing session. There are also many third party applications which you can add to your browser to block or manage cookies.

Existing cookies

To clear cookies that have previously been placed on your browser, you should select the option to clear your browsing history and ensure that the option to delete or clear cookies is included when you do so.

Google Adsettings

You can manage and opt out of personalisation of advertisements by Google by visiting Google’s ad settings page here https://adssettings.google.com/ and by:

unticking the button entitled ‘Also use Google Account activity and information to personalize ads on these websites and apps and store that data in your Google Account’; and
switching the ‘Ads Personalisation’ setting off (i.e. by ensuring the switch at the top of the page is set to the left/grey and not the right/blue).
Alternatively, you can install a free browser plugin here: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/7395996

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on

You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking by installing the browser add-on which is available here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

Facebook

We use cookies to target on Facebook through Facebook advertising. For more information visit the Facebook website.

LinkedIn

We use cookies to target on LinkedIn through LinkedIn Advertising. For more information visit the LinkedIn Website.

Copyright, credit and logo

This Cookies Policy is based on a template provided by GDPR Privacy Policy. For further information, please visit https://gdprprivacypolicy.org

The copyright in this Cookies Policy is either owned by, or licensed to, us and is protected by copyright laws around the world and copyright protection software. All intellectual property rights in this document are reserved. Where we display the GDPR Privacy Policy logo on our website, this is used to indicate that we have adopted a privacy policy template provided by GDPR Privacy Policy as the basis for this Privacy Policy.