Cookie Policy
Cookies and similar tracking technologies (such as pixels and local storage) are small files placed on your device to enhance your user experience and collect information about your interactions with our website and across the internet. While cookies themselves do not typically store personal data directly, they store unique identifiers. These identifiers, combined with personal data you provide during a transaction, may be used for specific advertising purposes detailed below, in alignment with our Privacy Policy.
What does 2SMS specially use cookies for?
Like many businesses, we use cookies to help us understand our customer base, and understanding our customer base means we can tailor our business, content and products to suit.
Lead tracking
Our cookies information helps us determine where our customer traffic has come from, whether that be a search engine, an advert or direct traffic. Also what the customer search term was, which allows us to see what our popular search terms are for our customers. Althea allows us to create relevant content and pages for our customers.
Google Analytics
A very common website tracking tool that is used by most businesses across the internet to see how their website is performing. This tool helps us see how much traffic our website receives, which pages are popular and how people journey around our website, helping us make improvements based on our customer habits. For more information see Google Analytics Website.
Google Ads, Enhanced Conversions, and Remarketing
We use Google Ads for our advertising campaigns across the internet. The associated cookies and tracking pixels allow us to:
- Measure Conversions: Track which of our ads successfully lead to a desired action on our website (e.g., a sign-up or purchase).
- Enhanced Conversion Measurement: To improve the accuracy of our conversion tracking, when you complete a transaction or sign-up, we use cookies/tags to combine the activity with personal identifiers you provide (like your email address or phone number). This personal data is immediately converted into a secure, irreversible, one-way hash (pseudonymised) on our website before it is sent to Google. This allows Google to match the conversion back to the user who clicked the ad, without sharing your raw personal data.
- Remarketing/Audience Creation: Record your visit to display relevant 2SMS advertisements to you later on a small number of selected partner websites.
Audience Targeting (Google Customer Match)
While not strictly cookie-based, we use your existing customer information (specifically hashed email addresses and hashed phone numbers) that you have provided to us, to create specific audience lists on the Google Ads platform (known as Customer Match).
The purpose of this is to:
- Show highly relevant advertising campaigns to our existing customers or similar groups of users.
- Exclude current customers from seeing ads for products they already own (ad suppression).
Note: The data shared with Google for this purpose is first hashed (pseudonymised) to ensure the raw identifiers are not transmitted. You have the right to object to this processing, as detailed in our main Privacy Policy
Website Performance and Optimisation (Webtrends Optimize)
We use Webtrends Optimize to enhance your user experience, improve website performance, and increase conversion rates. This platform uses cookies and tracking pixels to:
- A/B and Multivariate Testing: Measure the effectiveness of different versions of our webpages to determine the best design and content.
- Personalisation: Customise the content and user journey you see on our website based on your behaviour and preferences.
- Usage Data: Collect non-personally identifiable data elements (such as device type, browser information, and unique user IDs) to understand user engagement.
The legal basis for this processing is Consent, as this tool goes beyond strictly necessary site functions to enhance your experience.
Affiliates and partners
We have several partners and affiliates and our cookies allow us to see which partner a customer has come through.
Managing Cookies
You can allow or block cookies by either using the cookies consent management tool on our website, or by activating the setting on your browser that permits you to change the setting of all or some cookies. Please note that disabling cookies may affect the availability or functionality of our website. Most of the website will function normally, however, functions that rely on cookies such as _ga (used to distinguish unique users), will be disabled.
If you would like more information on how to manage cookies on some popular browsers, please click on the links below.