Ok, let’s talk about cookies.
I have a bit of a conflict here, because I’m a fan of privacy online. I agree with the principles of The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and I think there is a necessity for the “right to be forgotten” in some format and within reason.
That said, here’s the thing about this website: the entire purpose of this site is to help small business owners to increase their effectiveness and mental wellbeing. To do that better, it’s necessary to track design changes and user behaviour on websites, so there is a need for cookies.
This website is also a testing ground for experimentation in new technologies. So I shall be straight up: this is my site and I’m putting valuable information up here for no charge and so I absolutely reserve the right to use these cookies to track user behaviour on the site.
By visiting this site assume that you may be tracked anonymously using cookies from several different services. At the time of writing this I use very few but as the content and services increase so will the use of cookies. I can’t list them exhaustively because it will change quite regularly, but in general:
- At least one “analytics cookie”: this will tell me what pages visitors are looking at, and how long they spend on them. The purpose I use this for is to create more stuff that people like looking at. I don’t get your contact info. At time of writing I use Google Analytics for this, I have used others in the past.
- At least one “retargeting cookie”: this allows me to tell another service, e.g. Facebook, that someone visited my site. Then, later, I can say “Hey Facebook, show this advertisement to people who visited my site”. I don’t get your contact info. At time of writing I use Facebook retargeting for this but I definitely will be experimenting with other services over time, including any of the social media providers and any other service that provides retargeting.
- An “A/B Testing” or “Split Testing” cookie : this is used to improve the site design and content and tracks which version of something you were shown. E.g. I might split test a red button and an orange button – it tracks which coloured button was shown to you. Later this data is aggregated to give me a breakdown of how many clicked each one, e.g. 12% of 1000 visitors clicked the red version, 18% of 1000 visitors clicked the orange, therefore the orange is more effective.
- A “pop-up cookie”: this stores the fact that you were shown a cookie and closed it, and makes sure you’re not shown a cookie when you visit again. If you delete this cookie you’ll see a popup again, if you keep it.
- An “email service cookie”: this will store the email signup form that you used, and tells the email service that I use so that it knows which valuable free resource you just got. This may store which website pages you visited after registering for email. Note: this one MAY NOT be anonymised.
- A specific “previous visitor cookie”: I don’t have one currently, but it’s kind of like the analytics one, what it does is show different things to new visitors vs previous visitors. Something like “First time here? Check out our welcome page with free resources to get you started” vs “Welcome back! We’ve added a new resource to the advanced resources page that you may want to check out”.
- Other types of cookies: I don’t know what other types of cookies I might want to use here, but if one exists, assume it’s in use. I will definitely be experimenting with new technologies etc.
Some parts of the site may require these cookies to work. You are more than welcome to browse the website in Private or Incognito mode which stores no cookies, just bear in mind not all site features may work.
I hope you find the content useful enough and valuable enough to you and your business that you’ll put up with the use of cookies!
