Cookies

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What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files which are downloaded to your computer or mobile device when you visit a website or application. Your web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome) then sends these cookies back to the website or application on each subsequent visit so that they can recognise you and remember things like personalised details or user preferences.

Cookies are very useful and do lots of different jobs which help to make your experience on websites as smooth as possible. For example, they help with security, let you move between web pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improving your experience.

Strictly necessary cookies

These cookies are essential in helping you to move around our website and to use features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies some services may not function. These cookies do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you've been on the internet.

For example we use a cookie called CMSCookieLevel to remember which cookies have been allowed by visitors to our website www.ciof.org.uk.

Website Usage - Performance and Functionality Cookies:

We use Performance and Functionality cookies to:

Some of these cookies are managed for us by third parties – where this is the case we don't allow the third party to use the cookies for any purpose other than those listed above.

You can control whether or not these cookies are used, but preventing them may mean we can't offer you some services, and will reduce the support we can offer you. It's also possible that preventing these cookie stops us remembering that you didn't want a specific service.

Here is a list of the Performance and Functionality cookies which may be used on this website.

Cookie Name

Duration

Purpose

VisitorStatus

20 years

Indicates if the visitor is new or returning. Used for tracking the visitors statistic in Web analytics.

Source

50 years

Stores the channel from which the visitor arrived as part of a campaign (e.g., email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Based on the utm_source query string parameter.

Campaign

50 years

Stores the name of the campaign assigned to the visitor

Content

50 years

Stores the specific content item through which the visitor arrived as part of a campaign.

TrackedCampaigns

20 minutes

Stores all the campaigns, which should be tracked within a JavaScript snippet.

UrlReferrer

1 day

Stores the URL referrer from which the user arrives on the website.

CurrentContact

50 years

Stores the GUID of the contact related to the current site visitor. Used to track activities on the website.

CMSAB<ABtestname>

2 months

Used to track conversions for the test and maintain consistent page content for the visitor. Stores the name of the page variant assigned to the visitor, the list of performed conversions and information whether visitor is included in A/B testing specified by an A/B test.

CMSMVT<mvtestname>

1 month

Stores the combination of variants assigned to the visitor by an MVT test. Used to track conversions for the test and maintain consistent page content for the visitor.

CMSUserPage

20 minutes

Stores the IDs (DocumentID, NodeID) of the last visited page. Used for logging landing and exit page web analytics and activities.

CMSLandingPageLoaded

20 minutes

Indicates that the landing page has already been visited and the Landing page activity is not logged again for the current visitor. Expires after 20 minutes and the expiration period of the key is renewed every time the website is accessed again.

KenticoCookiePolicyTest

1 minute

A dummy cookie used to test whether the user's browser blocks 3rd party cookies. Does not carry any informational value.

 

 

We also use Google Analytics and Google Optimize to help us manage performance and functionality:

 

Cookie Name

Duration

Purpose

_ga

2 years

Used to distinguish users

_gid

24 hours

Used to distinguish users

_dc_gtm_UA-1762773-16

1 minute

Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_<property-id>.

AMP_TOKEN

30 seconds to 1 year

Contains a token that can be used to retrieve a Client ID from AMP Client ID service. Other possible values indicate opt-out, inflight request or an error retrieving a Client ID from AMP Client ID service.

_gac_<property-id>

90 days

Contains campaign related information for the user. If you have linked your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, Google Ads website conversion tags will read this cookie unless you opt-out.

_gaexp

Depends on the length of the experiment, but typically 90 days

Used to determine a user's inclusion in an experiment and the expiry of experiments a user has been included in.

 

_opt_awcid

24 hours

Used for campaigns mapped to Google Ads Customer IDs.

_opt_awmid

 

24 hours

Used for campaigns mapped to Google Ads Campaign IDs.

_opt_awgid

24 hours

Used for campaigns mapped to Google Ads Ad Group IDs.

_opt_awkid

24 hours

Used for campaigns mapped to Google Ads Criterion IDs.

_opt_utmc

24 hours

Stores the last utm_campaign query parameter.

 

We also use a web behaviour tracking cookie:

 

Cookie Name

Duration

Purpose

dm_i
recordID
sessionID

Ranges from a cookie that expires after 20 minutes (collecting session information on pages visited) to cookies that expire after 365 days.

Tracks and identifies a visitor as an Engagement Cloud contact whilst they browse a site’s pages. This data can then be used for better segmenting and targeting of contacts

Social Media and Third party cookies

When you open a video or social media embedded into a website, third party cookies may be added to your browser.

Type of cookie

Cookie name

Desription

YouTube cookies

PREF*

VSC*

VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE

remote_sid*

We embed videos from our official YouTube channel using YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode. This mode may set cookies on your computer once you click on the YouTube video player, but YouTube will not store personally-identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos using the privacy-enhanced mode.
Read more at YouTube’s embedding videos information page.

 

How to manage your cookie settings

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, visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

Find out how to manage cookies on popular browsers:

To find information relating to other browsers, visit the browser developer's website.

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