We use cookies to do a number of things. For example, remembering your preferences, recording what you've put in your shopping basket, or counting the number of people looking at a website. We also use them to keep track of what you've bought from us, what you've done on the site, and to make online advertising more relevant to you.
Cookies themselves don't hold personal information. They only have a unique alphanumeric identifier that sits on your browser. And in many cases, we won’t be able to link the information we collect by using a cookie back to you. They can, however, enable us to link that information back to you and your personal information, for example, when you log in, or choose to register for a service, white paper or newsletter.
We've put our cookies into the following categories, to make it easier for you to understand why we need them:
- Strictly necessary – these are used to help make our website work efficiently.
- Performance – these are used to analyse the way our website works and how we can improve it.
- Functionality – these help to enhance your experience by doing things like remembering products you've added to your basket.
- Targeting/advertising – these are used to share some information with third parties who we advertise with, so we know how you've reached our website. We can also use cookies to identify the parts of the website that you are interested in. We then use this information to show you adverts and pages we think may also be of interest to you, to tailor how we communicate with you, or to tailor the contents of the communications we send to you. If you prefer, you can opt out of these. Tailoring of content means it includes information reflecting the interest you’ve shown in the content of our web pages, or offers or promotions that we think may interest you, and to improve how we respond to your needs.
In addition to the cookies we use on our websites, we also use cookies and similar technologies in some emails and push notifications we send to mobile devices from our apps. These help us to understand whether you have opened the email and how you have interacted with it. If you have enabled images, cookies may be set on your computer or mobile device. Cookies will also be set if you click on any link within the email.
We sometimes use persistent cookies as well as 'session-based' cookies. A 'persistent' cookie will remain for a period of time set for that cookie. A 'session-based' cookie is allocated only for the duration of your visit to our website and automatically expires when you close down your browser.