Cookie Notice

Cookies are nothing new. They have been around since the days of the early web browsers. They simply make your web browsing more effective by remembering some preferences (e.g. your favourite location for weather), or your username for certain sites you log in to, they also allow organisations to see what pages work and which don’t. Many sites use a service called Google Analytics for this.

How they work Cookies are simply small data files created by a website on a user’s computer, or other browsing device such as a mobile phone or tablet. These files are stored on a user’s device.

Every time you connect to the Internet your browsing device is given a unique identifier called an IP address. However, most of this tracking is anonymous.

How the University of Chichester Academy Trust uses cookies Our external website uses Google Analytics. This allows us to see: how many visitors we’ve had; the most popular pages; how long people are staying on the site; and, approximately where they are based. There is nothing that identifies you an individual. We can, however, ascertain facts such as the number of visits from a particular town or city such as London, Chichester etc.

Google Analytics creates four cookies on your computer. The following explanation comes from

http://www.morevisibility.com/analyticsblog/from-__utma-to-__utmz-google...

The __utma Cookie This cookie is what’s called a “persistent” cookie, as in, it never expires (technically, it does expire…in the year 2038…but for the sake of explanation, let’s pretend that it never expires, ever). 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.

The __utmb and __utmc Cookies The B and C cookies are brothers, working 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 pageview to happen, and if it doesn’t, it expires.

The __utmz Cookie Mr. __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 they were in the world when you accessed a website. It expires in 15,768,000 seconds – or, 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 Ecommerce Transaction. __utmz also lets you edit its length with a simple customization to the Google Analytics Tracking code.

The __utmv Cookie If you are making use of the user-defined report in Google Analytics, and have coded something on your site for some custom segmentation, the __utmv cookie gets set on the person’s computer, so that Google Analytics knows how to classify that visitor. The __utmv cookie is also a persistent, lifetime cookie.

So, as you can see, no personal information. If a website was a shopping centre, then these cookies would be like the systems that track footfall ie how many customers are coming and going.
If you would like any further information please contact catfinance@chi.ac.uk

By using this site you consent to our cookie policy.

Disclaimer

Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information published on our website. The website information given is intended as a guide and does not form a contract or the terms of a contract between the University of Chichester Academy Trust and a third party.