Cookies
What are Cookies?
Cookies are very small text files stored on your hard drive. They uniquely identify your computer and allow us to store information about your session on our website, improve website security and help us 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.
We use Google Analytics which is a tool that records data about all the users who arrive to our website. The cookies that are used by Google Analytics are details later on this page
What types of Cookies are used?
(i) Strictly Necessary Cookies
These Cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around stmichaels.ie and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website.
(ii) Performance Cookies
These Cookies collect information about how visitors use stmichaels.ie, 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 stmichaels.ie works.
(iii) Targeting/Advertising Cookies
stmichaels.ie does not use these cookies in any part of our website.
List of Cookies Used on www.stmichaels.ie
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:
- 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 our website in excess of one hour. This cookie is reset each time you return to stmichaels.ie. Do data is saved from this cookie
Google Analytics related cookie
__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.
__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.
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.
For more detailed information on cookies, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.