If you are a site that is based anywhere in the EU, you will legally need to have a Cookie Policy overlay on your site to warn visitors your site will be dropping cookies on their computer. Pretty much all sites do this, as cookies are used for everything from analytics to web functionality to advertising.
The Online Advertising Guide‘s cookie policy overlay can be seen when you first load this site, or if you’ve already agreed, as a link in the footer of every page.
We use Iubenda to manage our Cookie Policy. You can find our full cookie policy here.
We recommend Iubenda as a convenient and cost-effective way to manage your cookie policy. To get 10% off their services, please follow this link.
If you click on our cookie policy you can see that it does two things – tells you the cookies we are using and how to stop cookies. You can also see a surprisingly large amount of services are dropping cookies through our site – and we try hard to limit it! This is why we recommend Iubenda. Although you can create a cookie policy yourself, using a company with experience is usually the best way to go.
About Cookie Policies
All Cookie policies must tell people:
- An explanation of what cookies are and what they do
- How users can block cookies.
And that’s all. You should take care to explain to your users why they shouldn’t be afraid of cookies (touching key points such as they can’t scan your computer or introduce a virus) so that users are discouraged from blocking cookies. Without those cookies from your analytics provider, you won’t get the in-depth information you want on how users use your site, and without advertising cookies, you’ll probably make a little less money from your ads.
As for blocking cookies, you simply need to point them to places where they can find out how – this is simpler than trying to write a guide to how to block cookies in all browsers, although if you’ve got the coding skills you could make your cookie policy overlay do it for them.
To make it easier on you, some good source material is:
• EU Cookie Laws Sample Privacy Policy on Cookies Usage: http://eucookielaw.org.uk/sample-cookie-privacy-policy
• wikiHow’s excellent how to: http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Website-Cookie-Policy
• As well as wikiHow’s own sample policy: http://www.wikihow.com/Sample/WikiHow-Cookie-Policy
You can copy and edit the below if you like for your own Cookie Policy, however (again) we highly recommend using Iubenda to create a full Cookie and Privacy policy.
Sample Cookie Policy
What are cookies?
Cookies are the confusingly adorably named tiny text files that can be placed on your computer or mobile device that uniquely (but anonymously) identify your browser or device. They are unable to search your computer in any way, cannot introduce viruses to your computer and contain no personal identifying information about you (basically they are nothing to be afraid of).
What are cookies used for?
Cookies are used by sites or services when they want to know if your computer or device has visited that site or service before. These cookies on your computer or device can then be used to help remember your preferences (such as language), help you navigate between pages efficiently, and generally improve your browsing experience.
Similarly, cookies are used by web publishers to help understand how their site or service is being used. Services such as Google Analytics use cookies to provide anonymous aggregated data such as how long users, in general, spent on the site, how many pages they visited and in which order etc.
Cookies can also be used for online advertising – by aggregating the very basic information cookies gather, informed guesses could be made about your demographic and ads targeted to you thusly. Or more simply – if you go to a site about watches, it may drop a cookie on your computer, so the next sites you go to will then contain ads about watches.
What types of cookies does The Online Advertising Guide use?
There are generally four categories of cookies: “Strictly Necessary,” “Performance,” “Functionality,” and “Targeting.” The Online Advertising Guide routinely uses three of these types of cookie: “Strictly Necessary,” “Performance,” and “Targeting.”
Here is some information about each cookie category:
- Strictly Necessary Cookies. These cookies are essential, as they enable you to move around The Online Advertising Guide and use its features. For example – the cookie to say you have/have not allowed cookies to be used on this site.
- Performance Cookies. These cookies collect information about how you have used The Online Advertising Guide, for example, Google Analytics, which is used to track basic user behaviour on this site so we can try and improve our users’ experience.
- Targeting Cookies. Our advertising partners or other third-party partners may use these types of cookies to deliver advertising that is relevant to your interests. These cookies can remember that your device has visited a site or service, and may also be able to track your device’s browsing activity on other sites or services other than The Online Advertising Guide. This information may be shared with organizations outside The Online Advertising Guide, such as advertisers and/or advertising networks to deliver the advertising, and to help measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign or other business partners for the purpose of providing aggregate Service usage statistics and aggregate Service testing.
- Functionality Cookies. The Online Advertising Guide do not use this type of cookies, but just so you know: these cookies allow sites/services to remember how you’re logged in, when you logged in or out, and possibly anything you’ve done on a site while logged in. The information these cookies collect may be anonymous, and they are not used to track your browsing activity on other sites or services.
How long will cookies stay on my device?
The amount of time a cookie stays on your device is variable: the majority of cookies expire after the end of your browsing session– others persist for longer. In online advertising, you can generally expect most advertising cookies to last about one month at most (although again it varies).
First and third party cookies
First-party cookies are cookies that belong to The Online Advertising Guide, third-party cookies are cookies that another party places on your device through our site. Third-party cookies may be placed on your device by someone providing a service for The Online Advertising Guide, for example, to help us understand how our service is being used. Third-party cookies may also be placed on your device by our business partners so that they can use them to advertise products and services to you elsewhere on the Internet.
How to control and delete cookies
Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.
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