Effective date: October 5, 2012
Last revised: October 10, 2020
We use cookies and other technologies on this website to improve its performance and enhance users’ experiences. This policy explains how we do that.
Cookies are small text files placed by web servers on your computer or mobile device when you access websites. “First party” cookies are set by websites that you are visiting at the time. “Third party” cookies are set by domains other than those of the websites that you visit.
“Session” cookies remain on your computer or mobile device during your visit and expire when you close your browser. “Persistent” cookies, conversely, remain on your computer/device for a period of time specified in the cookie. We use first party persistent cookies to set and remember your preferences for repeat visits to our site. We use third party persistent cookies from HubSpot and CookiePro to analyze how our visitors use our website and to monitor website performance and to manage our visitors` consent to cookie usage. We maintain a list of cookies that we use on this site and we update the list at least annually.
Most cookies fall into one or more of the following categories:
These types of cookies are essential to provide services specifically requested by website visitors. When accessing secure areas of websites, making purchases on e-commerce sites or submitting online forms, these types of cookies are essential. Without them, websites cannot function or deliver the requested services. GfK uses strictly necessary cookies on this website and we use them on other websites that we operate, such as our client portals and panel websites.
These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, such as which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective, and if users encounter error messages from web pages. These cookies allow us to provide a high quality experience for users. The information collected by these cookies does not identify users and is aggregated. They are designed to help improve how our website works.
We use performance cookies on this site including those from our web analytics provider HubSpot, Inc.
These cookies remember choices that you make so as to improve your experience. We use functionality cookies to remember your preferences. For example, we set a permanent cookie to remember your country and language selections. We also provide social widgets – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sharing tools – for users that would like to share content on our site with their friends, followers and connections. These social widgets are disabled by default, but you can enable them during your visit. If you enable the Like button, we will remember that preference on your next visit.
These cookies collect information about your browsing habits in order to make advertising relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. They are usually placed by advertising networks or social networking firms with the website operator’s permission. Market researchers also set these cookies to measure ad exposure and deliver aggregated, statistical data to advertisers about the effectiveness of their campaigns.
GfK provides visitors convenient tools to share content on our website with their social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. When you click on a third party social widget or button to share content, the third party will learn that you have visited our website and may subsequently use information about your visit to target advertising to you on other websites. To protect your privacy, we have programmed the social widgets on our site so that they are disabled by default. Information about your visit to our website is not shared with social media companies unless you click on their respective widgets. We do not display behaviorally targeted advertising on this website; however, our Digital Market Intelligence (DMI) division works closely with advertising networks and publishers to help them measure and optimize campaigns on websites that display ads.
Yes, you can adjust the privacy settings in your browser to block all cookies; however, this could severely affect your browsing experience as many websites may not function properly. Your browser may allow you to delete all cookies upon closing your browser. This option, though, results in persistent cookies getting deleted that may store your preferences and personalized settings on websites that you visit regularly. It is possible to keep desired cookies, though, as your browser may allow you to specify which websites are always or never allowed to use cookies.
As is true of most websites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes IP addresses, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp and clickstream data. We use this information to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users' movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. We may link this automatically-collected data to personal information for legitimate purposes, such as to detect and prevent fraudulent activity.
A web beacon (also known as a tag, clear gif or 1x1 pixel), consists of a small string of code that is embedded within a web page or email. There may or may not be a visible graphic image associated with the web beacon and often the image is designed to blend into the background of the web page or email. Our website analytics provider, HubSpot, uses web beacons throughout our site to help us understand how visitors use our site and to improve the performance of our site. A Facebook web beacon is present when visitors to our site activate the Like button. Our marketing communications and survey invitation emails may contain web beacons to tell us whether our emails are opened and to verify any clicks through to links within the email. We may use this information to determine which of our emails are more interesting to users, to improve the quality of the emails that we send and to query users who do not open our emails whether they wish to continue receiving them. The web beacon is deleted when you delete the email. If you would prefer not to have web beacons in the emails that you receive, you should adjust your email program to receive messages in plain text rather than HTML. It is also possible to detect and control web beacons that are present on web pages by downloading a plug-in for your browser.
We use Google Analytics to better understand how our Websites and mobile apps are used. Furthermore we use it for retargeting purposes. Personal Data including your IP-address collected through Google Analytics may be transferred to Google servers. The information collected includes the pages a visitor visits, the time a visit occurred, whether the visitor has been to the site before and what site referred the visitor to the web page.
Legal Basis for processing of your personal data is your consent. Retention period is until the purpose is achieved and no other legal retention terms are in place. You can any time withdraw your consent for the future under this link . All processing activities that took place prior to withdrawal of consent remain legally valid. Recipients of your data are our suppliers and group companies.
To opt out, you can disable cookies in your browser and you can install the Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on, which prevents Google Analytics from collecting information about website visits. For more information please visit https://policies.google.com/privacy.
The LinkedIn Insight collect insights about our website visitors. We use the LinkedIn Insight Tag to track conversions, directly address website visitors, and unlock additional insights about how LinkedIn users interacting with our content. The LinkedIn Insight Tag enables the collection of metadata such as IP address information, timestamp, and events such as page views. The LinkedIn browser cookie is stored in a visitor's browser until they delete the cookie or the cookie You can opt out of cookies from LinkedIn on your LinkedIn settings page and recommend you read their Cookie Policy for more information.
Comprehensive information on how organizations use cookies is available at:
The list of GfK and third party cookies below was current 15 May 2018. It is updated at least annually.
Name | Description | Lifespan | Category |
hubspotutk |
Cookie used for user authentication. |
13 months |
Functional Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie ensures that all features and functionality are added to the site correctly. |
365 days |
Functional Cookies |
__cfduid |
Ensures that all features and functionality are added to the site correctly. |
365 days |
Functional Cookies |
hubspotutk |
Its purpose is user authentication. |
365 days |
Functional Cookies |
__hssc |
Cookie used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Performance Cookies |
__hstc |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Performance Cookies |
__hssc |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Performance Cookies |
__hssrc |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
SESSION |
Performance Cookies |
__hstc |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Performance Cookies |
__hssrc |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
SESSION |
Performance Cookies |
Optanon AlertBoxClosed |
Cookie used for management of cookie consent. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
Optanon AlertBoxClosed |
This cookie is set by websites using certain versions of the cookie law compliance solution from OneTrust. It enables the website not to show the cookie consent message more than once to a user. The cookie has a one year lifespan and contains no personal information. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__cfduid |
Cookie is used to speed up page load times. It does not contain any user identification information. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
player |
Vimeo’s embeddable video player uses first-party cookies that we consider essential to the video player experience. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
OptanonConsent |
This cookie is set by the cookie compliance solution from OneTrust. It stores information about the categories of cookies the site uses and whether visitors have given or withdrawn consent for the use of each category. It contains no information that can identify the site visitor. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__cfruid |
Cookie used to identify trusted web traffic. |
SESSION |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
OptanonConsent |
This cookie is set by CookiePro CDN provider. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
vuid |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is set by HubSpot’s CDN provider, Cloudflare. It helps Cloudflare detect malicious visitors to your website and minimizes blocking legitimate users. |
30 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__hssrc |
Whenever HubSpot changes the session cookie, this cookie is also set to determine if the visitor has restarted their browser. |
SESSION |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__hstc |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
13 months |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is set by GfK CDN provider. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is set by HubSpot’s CDN provider, Cloudflare. It helps Cloudflare detect malicious visitors to your website and minimizes blocking legitimate users. |
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
__hssc |
|
30 minutes |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
__cfduid |
|
365 days |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
hubspotutk |
|
365 days |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
__cfduid |
This cookie is used for website analytics. |
365 days |
Web-Analytics Cookies |
hs_langswitcher_ choice |
This cookie is used to save the visitor’s selected language choice when viewing web pages. |
2 years |
Strictly Necessary Cookies |
gfk-job_seeker |
This cookie is used to provide personalized content. |
3 days |
Functional |
Cookies set by Google Analytics | |||
_ga |
Used to distinguish users. |
2 years |
Functional |
_gid |
Used to distinguish users. |
24 hours |
Functional |
_gat |
Used to throttle request rate. If Google Analytics is deployed via Google Tag Manager, this cookie will be named _dc_gtm_<property-id>. |
1 minute |
Performance |
AMP_TOKEN |
Contains a token that can be used to retrieve a Client ID from AMP Client ID service. Other possible values indicate opt-out, inflight request or an error retrieving a Client ID from AMP Client ID service. |
30 seconds to 1 year |
Functional |
_gac_<property-id> |
Contains campaign related information for the user. If you have linked your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, Google Ads website conversion tags will read this cookie unless you opt-out. |
90 days |
Functional |
__utma |
Used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utma cookies exists. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics. |
2 years from set/update |
Functional |
__utmt |
Used to throttle request rate. |
10 minutes |
Performance |
__utmb |
Used to determine new sessions/visits. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and no existing __utmb cookies exists. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics. |
30 mins from set/update |
Analytics |
__utmc |
Not used in ga.js. Set for interoperability with urchin.js. Historically, this cookie operated in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine whether the user was in a new session/visit. |
End of browser session |
Functional |
__utmz |
Stores the traffic source or campaign that explains how the user reached your site. The cookie is created when the javascript library executes and is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics. |
6 months from set/update |
Analytics |
__utmv |
Used to store visitor-level custom variable data. This cookie is created when a developer uses the _setCustomVar method with a visitor level custom variable. This cookie was also used for the deprecated _setVar method. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics. |
2 years from set/update |
Functional |
Cookies set by LinkedIn |
|||
UserMatchHistory | LinkedIn Ads ID syncing | 30 days | Functional |
AnalyticsSyncHistory | Used to store information about the time a sync with the lms_analytics cookie took place for users in the Designated Countries | 30 days | Functional |
li_oatml | Used to identify LinkedIn Members off LinkedIn for advertising and analytics outside the Designated Countries and, for a limited time, advertising in the Designated Countries | 30 days | Functional |
lms_ads | Used to identify LinkedIn Members off LinkedIn in the Designated Countries for advertising | 30 days | Functional |
lms_analytics | Used to identify LinkedIn Members in the Designated Countries for analytics | 30 days | Functional |
li_fat_id | Member indirect identifier for Members for conversion tracking, retargeting, analytics | 30 days | Functional |
li_sugr | Used to make a probabilistic match of a user's identity outside the Designated Countries | 90 days | Functional |
U | Browser Identifier for users outside the Designated Countries | 3 months | Functional |
_guid | Used to identify a LinkedIn Member for advertising through Google Ads | 90 days | Functional |
BizographicsOptOut | Determine opt-out status for 3rd party tracking | 10 years | Functional |
lang | Used to remember a user's language setting | Session | Functional |
lissc | Used to ensure there is correct SameSite attribute for all cookies in that browser | 365 days | Functional |
lissc1 | Used to assess SameSite cookie attribute and study its impact on LinkedIn | 30 days | Functional |
lissc2 | Used to assess SameSite cook attribute and study its impact on LinkedIn | 30 days | Functional |
bcookie | Browser Identifier cookie to uniquely identify devices accessing LinkedIn to detect abuse on the platform | 2 years | Functional |
lidc |
To optimize data center selection | 24 hours | Functional |