Cookies and Tracking Technologies Policy
This policy is split into three sections:
- What are cookies and tracking technologies?
- The cookies and tracking technologies we use
- Classification of cookies we use
- How do I change my cookie settings?
1. Cookies and Tracking Technologies
Where we talk about cookies on our websites, we mean cookies and web beacons.
What is a cookie?
A cookie is a text file containing a small amount of data which is downloaded to your computer when you visit this website. The vast majority of websites use cookies and tracking technologies. Cookies are useful because they help us arrange the content and layout of our websites and recognise those computers that have been to our website before. They allow us to remember your preference settings and play an important role in helping us to enhance the usability and performance of our website and your experience using it. Some cookies are also essential to enable you to move around our website and use its features.
What is a web beacon?
Web beacons are usually tiny transparent images that help website owners track the activity of users on certain web pages. They can also send the website owner information in cookies such as whether an email with a web beacon in it has been opened. We use web beacons together with cookies to help us understand how you interact with our website and the emails we send you; to help us improve your browsing experience; and to better manage our website and email content.
2. Cookies and Tracking Technologies we use
When you access our website, you will receive a message advising you that we use cookies to allow us to analyse site performance and to improve your experience. It is necessary to place some cookies on your computer in order to display the website to you correctly. If you continue to use our website, further cookies may be placed on your computer to maximise your experience on our website to help us understand how we can improve it. Additionally, we use Goggle Analytics to help analyse how users use our website.
3. Classification of cookies we use
The cookies on our site are broken down into three categories – Essential, Analytics and Customisation and Third Party. Essential cookies are needed for our site to function, and can therefore not be turned off. You can opt out of all other cookies, as set out above, if desired. Please remember – if you do delete all your cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, will not work and your experience on our websites may be affected.
Essential
These cookies are essential to enable you to move around the websites and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the websites. Without these cookies, our websites won’t work properly.
Analytics and Customisation
Our Analytics cookies collect information about how you use our websites and help us improve how our website work. For instance, this could be the pages you visit most often and any error messages from those pages.
Additionally we have Customisation cookies that allow us to remember the choices you make (such as your username and password) and provide enhanced, more personal features. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of our web pages that you can customise.
They may also be used to provide services you have requested such as watching a video or leaving comments.
We use tools such as Google Analytics to help us better understand how our customers navigate to and through our websites, how long customers spend visiting our content items, how often they return to visit our websites and what demographic categories (age, gender, interests) they fall into. Google Analytics uses cookies to collect this information and this information helps us to improve our websites.
You may stop the transmission of information generated by the cookies about your use of our website to Google, by downloading and installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on available here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
Please see Google’s privacy notice for further information.
Third-party cookies
Google Analytics uses cookies to help analyse how users use our website. The information generated by the cookies about your use of our website will be transmitted by your browser to, and will be stored by Google on servers in the United States and/or other countries. Google will use this information on our behalf for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage to us. We do not collect your IP address as explained in our Privacy Policy.
You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. You may also stop the transmission of information generated by the cookies about your use of the website to Google, by downloading and installing the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on here: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
We also use the following tools from Google:
Google Tag Manager which is a tool that enables us to effectively add, update and manage marketing, tracking and analytics tags across our site. For more information please visit Google Tag Manager.
Google Optimise enables us to test variations of our website pages or elements within the pages. These tests will usually result in improvements to the website and your experience.
4. How do I change my cookie settings?
If you don’t want us to place cookies on your computer then there are a number of ways you can opt out – setting your browser either to reject all cookies, to only allow “trusted” sites to set them, to accept only those cookies from those websites which you are currently on.
The very useful www.aboutcookies.org gives detailed step-by-step guidance on how to control and delete cookies depending on your browser. You can then adjust your browser settings to your preferred level of protection.
You can also use the links below to find out how to manage cookies on popular browsers:
To find information relating to other browsers, please visit the browser developer’s website.
Policy last updated 21st June 2018