Cookies In Use on This Site

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
• Save you having to login every time you visit the site
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Offer you free services/content (thanks to advertising)
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
• 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

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:

• Making our shopping basket and checkout work
• Determining if you are logged in or not
• Remembering your search settings
• Allowing you to add comments to our site

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 videos; PayPal for purchases; Aweber if you sign up to our newsletter.

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties

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.

Cookies are set by: Facebook; Twitter; Linkedin; Google +; Reddit; Tumblr; Pocket; Pinterest.

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.

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

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 http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/iab-good-practice-principles

You can learn more about online advertising at http://www.youronlinechoices.com . You can opt-out of almost all advertising cookies at http://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 ads from: Rubicon Project; AppNexus; DoubleClick; Awin; familytreedna.com; TheGenealogist

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. Our partners include: Awin; LivingDNA; familytreedna.com; TheGenealogist

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 as explained above.

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. Our affiliate cookies are provided by our: Itthinx’s Affiliates Pro plugin

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 http://www.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.