Cookie Policy
What are cookies?
As is common practice with almost all professional websites, this site uses cookies, which are small files that are downloaded to your computer or mobile device to improve your experience or to enable core functionality of the website. When you return to a website or use websites that use the same cookie, they recognise your cookies and, therefore, your browsing device.
This page describes what cookies this site uses, why we use them and when they expire. We will also share how you can prevent these cookies from being stored, however this may downgrade or 'break' certain elements of the site's functionality.
We use cookies to...
- Improve our understanding of how you navigate through our website in order that we can make improvements.
- Inform us of whether to you have already seen notices on our website, eg newsletter sign up banners.
- Store login details for our secure login pages.
Cookies that we use on this website
The cookies that we use can be split into session cookies, first party cookies and third party cookies.
Session cookies
These cookies expire when the browser is closed.
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
| has_js | Tells our website whether you have Javascript enabled in your browser. | When you close your browser |
First party cookies
These cookies are provided by the IES website.
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
| newsletter | This tells us to stop showing you a sign up notice for our email newsletter. | 1 year |
| fb_cookie_policy | This tells us if you have dismissed our cookie notice. | 3 months |
Third party cookies
These cookies are provided by third parties with the aim of collecting certain information for use by IES in other platforms, such as Google Analytics.
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
| _ga | This lets us know if you've visited our website before. | 26 months |
| _gat | Used to manage the rate at which page view requests are made. | 10 minutes |
| _gid | This helps us track how you use our website in order to see if you've visited before and helps us improve your experience. | 24 hours |
| _utma | Like _ga, this lets us know if you've visited our site before. This allows us to calculate how many of our visitors are returning or are new visitors to certain pages. | 26 months |
| _utmb | Used to determine new sessions/visits with _utma to calculate the average length of time you spend on our site. | 30 minutes |
| _utmz | Used to calculate source and campaign information to explain how you reached our site. | 6 months |
| _utmv | Used to track visitor behaviour and measure site performance. | 26 months |
In addition to these third party cookies, some embedded content on our website also uses third party cookies.
Embedded content
Some of the content on our site may be provided by third parties. This includes but is not limited to: Google Maps for interactive mapping, or YouTube and Vimeo for hosted video. When you visit a page containing content from one of these sites a cookie may be set. We do not have any control over these cookies and you should check the relevant third party website for more information about these cookies.
Cookies in emails
In addition to cookies that we use on this website, we also use cookies in our emails in order to track if you have opened them and how you interact with the email. Cookies also allow us to see which links you click within the email. If you have enabled images, cookies may be set on your computer or mobile device. This is achieved through single pixel gifs, known as 'web beacons', in every email we send out to our email marketing list. Web beacons record each subscriber's email address, IP address, date and time associated with each open and click in each email.
Read the cookie notice of our email marketing provider, Mailchimp, for more on how cookies are used in our emails.
More information
For more general information on cookies see the Wikipedia article on HTTP Cookies.
Disabling cookies
You can prevent the setting of cookies by adjusting the settings on your browser (see your browser Help for how to do this). Be aware that disabling cookies may affect the functionality of this and many other websites that you visit.