Cookie Policy
First and foremost, we DO NOT sell your personal information. However, when you visit or interact with our sites, services, applications, tools or messaging, we or our authorized service providers may use cookies, web beacons, and other similar technologies to make your experience better, faster and safer for advertising purposes and to allow us to continuously improve our sites, services, applications and tools. Any personal information or data collected by these technologies is used only by us or by our authorized service providers on our behalf.
What are cookies, web beacons and similar technologies
These technologies are essentially small data files placed on your computer, tablet, mobile phone or other device (collectively, a “device”) that allows us to record information when you visit or interact with our websites, service, applications, messaging, and other tools. Though often these technologies are generically referred to as “Cookies,” each functions slightly differently, and is better explained below:
What are Cookies?
Cookies are very small text files stored on your hard drive. They uniquely identify your computer and allow the website to store information about your session on the website, improve website security and helps to customise your website experience. A unique user identity is created which ensures that you are not required to re-enter login details as you move throughout the website if logged in as a customer.
Cookies: Cookies are small (often encrypted) text files placed in the memory of your web browser or device when you visit a website or view a message. Cookies allow a website to recognize a particular device or browser. There are several types of cookies:
Cookies are used for a variety of purposes on our website. For example, they store information that allows us to present our site in your local language, or prices in local currency. They also communicate data to our servers when you visit our site, allowing you to stay logged in to your account during your visit or maintain the site preferences you set. Preventing your browser from accepting 1st party cookies will prevent the placement of some cookies that are classified as “Essential”.
Web beacons (pixels): A web beacon (also called “tracking pixels” or “image tags”) is a small file (most often a transparent, 1×1 GIF file) that is loaded on our web pages. These pixels may work in concert with cookies to collect information about your visit, your web browser/device, browsing activity, or onsite behaviour and provide that information to service providers. Pixels are most commonly used to collect anonymous traffic metrics (page visits, button clicks, order completion) used to analyse site performance.
Scripts: A script is a small piece of website code placed on our websites to power customer service tools like live chat, allow for the delivery of video tutorials in our help section, and allow us to provide interactive experiences to visitors. They are also used to collect data that we use for website analytics, or to provide data on the effectiveness of our advertising.
Similar technologies: Technologies that store information in your browser or device utilizing local shared objects or local storage, such as HTML 5 cookies, and other web application software methods. These technologies can operate across all of your browsers. In some instances, these technologies may not be fully managed by your browser and may require management directly through your installed applications or device. We do not use these technologies for storing information to target advertising to you on or off our sites.
How cookies are used
Cookies are used to assist in making a website work more efficiently. They are used to remember your preferences, for example; your IP address and the time you first visited the website. When you leave the site and come back to it, this information can be reloaded from your computer thereby generally improving your user experience. By default, this only user for one hour.
We may also use Google Analytics which is a tool that records data about all the users who arrive to the website. The cookies that are used by Google Analytics are detailed on this page.
What technologies do we use and why
Our cookies, web beacons and similar technologies serve various purposes, but generally they (1) are necessary or essential to the functioning of our sites, services, applications, tools or messaging, (2) help us improve the performance of or provide you extra functionality of the same, (3) help us to serve relevant and targeted advertisements, or (4) allow us to offer support tools that you utilise to interact with our care guides:
Strictly Necessary or Essential: "Strictly necessary" or “essential” cookies, web beacons and similar technologies let you move around the website and use essential features like secure areas and shopping baskets. Without these technologies, services you have asked for cannot be provided. Please note that these technologies do not gather any information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you’ve been on the internet. Accepting these technologies is a condition of using our sites, services, applications, tools or messaging, so if you utilize tools that might prevent these from loading, we can’t guarantee your use or how the security therein will perform during your visit.
Performance: Performance technologies may include first or third-party cookies, web beacons/pixels, and scripts placed in order to gather information about how you use our website (pages you visit, if you experience any errors, load times). These cookies do not collect any information that could identify you and are only used to help us improve how our website works, understand the interests of our users, and measure how effective our content is by providing anonymous statistics and data regarding how our website is used.
Advertising: Advertising technology may include first or third-party cookies, web beacons/pixels, and scripts placed in order to gather information on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, deliver personalised content, or to generate data that allows for the delivery of advertising relevant to your specific interests on our sites, as well as third-party websites. We also utilise 3rd party service providers to assist us in delivering on the same functions, which means that our authorised service providers may also place cookies, web beacons and similar technologies on your device via our services (first and third party cookies). They may also collect information that helps them identify your device, such as IP address, or other unique or device identifiers.
Support: Support technologies may include first or third-party cookies, web beacons / pixels, and scripts placed in order to provide tools for you to interact with our customer support teams. This technology allows us to provide chat services, gather customer feedback, and other tools used to support our visitors. Data collected for these purposes is never used for marketing or advertising purposes.
What types of Cookies are used on IELKS.com?
- Strictly Necessary Cookies These Cookies are essential to enable you to move around IELKS.com and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website.
- Performance Cookies These Cookies collect information about how visitors use IELKS.com, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These Cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these Cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how IELKS.com works.
- Targeting/Advertising Cookies IELKS.com does not use these cookies in any part of our website.
List of Cookies Used on IELKS.com
PHPSESSID:
The PHPSESSID cookies are created/sent when a user ‘session’ is created. When you enter the site for the first time you are assigned a PHPSESSID cookie. This cookie stores details such as:
The PHPSESSID cookies are created/sent when a user ‘session’ is created. When you enter the site for the first time you are assigned a PHPSESSID cookie. This cookie stores details such as:
- Your IP Address
- The time you arrived on the site
- If you have chosen to hide the cookie message at the bottom of the website.
This session cookie has a timeout that expires if there has been no activity between your computer and the website in excess of one hour. This cookie is reset each time you return to IELKS.com Do data is saved from this cookie.
Google Analytics related cookies
__utma: This cookie keeps track of the number of times a visitor has been to the site pertaining to the cookie, when their first visit was, and when their last visit occurred. Google Analytics uses the information from this cookie to calculate things like Days and Visits to purchase. This cookie is what’s called a ‘persistent’ cookie, as in, it is not set to automatically expire unless removed by the user.
‘__utmb’ and ‘utmc’:
The B and C cookies work together to calculate how long a visit takes. __utmb takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor enters a site, while __utmc takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor leaves a site. __utmb expires at the end of the session. __utmc waits 30 minutes, and then it expires. You see, __utmc has no way of knowing when a user closes their browser or leaves a website, so it waits 30 minutes for another page view to happen, and if it doesn’t, it expires.
The B and C cookies work together to calculate how long a visit takes. __utmb takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor enters a site, while __utmc takes a timestamp of the exact moment in time when a visitor leaves a site. __utmb expires at the end of the session. __utmc waits 30 minutes, and then it expires. You see, __utmc has no way of knowing when a user closes their browser or leaves a website, so it waits 30 minutes for another page view to happen, and if it doesn’t, it expires.
__utmz:
__utmz keeps track of where the visitor came from, what search engine you used, what link you clicked on, what keyword you used, and where you were in the world when you accessed a website. It expires in 6 months. This cookie is how Google Analytics knows to whom and to what source / medium / keyword to assign the credit for a Goal Conversion or an E-commerce Transaction.
__utmz keeps track of where the visitor came from, what search engine you used, what link you clicked on, what keyword you used, and where you were in the world when you accessed a website. It expires in 6 months. This cookie is how Google Analytics knows to whom and to what source / medium / keyword to assign the credit for a Goal Conversion or an E-commerce Transaction.
All Google Analytics information is recorded anonymously and does not provide or share any user-identifiable information, for more information, please see Google’s Privacy Policy.
How to manage, control and delete these technologies
You may block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) it may limit your use of certain features or functions on our website or service. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies as soon as you visit our site. Please note, as further described in our Privacy Policy, we currently do not alter our practices when we receive a “Do Not Track” signal from a visitor’s browser.
If you wish to withdraw your consent at any time, you will need to delete your cookies using your internet browser settings.
More information about cookies
- Useful information about cookies, including information about deleting or blocking cookies, can be found at: http://www.allaboutcookies.org
- A guide to behavioral advertising and online privacy has been produced by the internet advertising industry which can be found at: http://www.youronlinechoices.eu
- Information on the ICC (UK) UK cookie guide can be found on the ICC website section: https://www.international-chamber.co.uk/our-expertise/digitaleconomy
For more detailed information on cookies, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
Contact Us
We hope the information in this policy provides you with clear information about the technologies we use and the purposes for which we use them, but it you have any additional questions, or require any additional information, please review our Privacy Policy or contact us info@ielks.com.