Cookie policy

1. What a cookie is

A cookie is a small file that a website stores on your device, for example to remember the choice you have made. Some cookies are needed to make a site work; others serve to measure how the site is used or to tailor advertising. Besides cookies, a website can also store data in your browser’s local storage; where this policy speaks of cookies, it applies to that storage as well.

By default, this site loads only what is strictly necessary. Everything beyond that is loaded only after you have expressly consented to it. As long as you make no choice, nothing is placed for advertising purposes and nothing is stored on your device; use of the site is then only counted anonymously, without recognising you (see point 5).

2. Changing or withdrawing your choice

At the bottom of every page there is a Cookie preferences link. There you can indicate per category what you allow, change your choice or withdraw it entirely. Withdrawing is just as easy as allowing.

If you withdraw a category, what falls under it is also actually deleted — for statistics these are the cookies beginning with _ga or ph_ and _gid, PostHog’s local storage and the stored campaign information (westcool_utm); for marketing, _gcl_au, the cookies beginning with _gac_ and the stored click identifier from advertising links (westcool_click_ids).

Your choice itself is stored in the westcool_consent cookie, for six months. After that we ask you again.

3. Which categories there are

Necessary

Needed to make the website work and to remember your cookie choice itself (westcool_consent, six months). This also covers the login cookie of staff members who log in to the management environment, together with a cookie that only indicates that a staff member is logged in (westcool_internal, thirty days) — this lets us recognise our own staff members so that their visits are not counted in the statistics. These cookies are only placed for staff members, never for visitors. This category cannot be switched off: without these cookies we cannot store your choice.

Functional

For embedded components that have to remember a preference or a session. This category is off by default.

Statistics

To measure which pages are visited and where visitors get stuck. For this we use PostHog, which processes these data within the European Union. Without your consent, PostHog counts visits without storing anything on your device or recognising you. If you accept this category, it may recognise your browser on a subsequent visit and sessions may be recorded in order to trace problems; what you type into input fields is not recorded. In addition we then remember locally in your browser (westcool_utm) which campaign or advertisement brought you to the site — the utm data from the link, for ninety days at most — so that a request can be linked to the correct campaign.

Marketing

To tailor our advertising and to measure whether an advertisement led to a request (Google Ads), and to load the embedded Google Maps map on the contact page. If you accept this category, we store locally in your browser (westcool_click_ids) the click identifier that an advertising link passes on — such as Google Ads’ gclid — so that a request can be linked to the correct advertisement, also when you return later; we keep this for ninety days at most. Google Maps writes advertising identifiers and therefore falls under marketing and not under functional; as long as you do not accept this category, we show the address with a plain link to Google Maps instead of the map.

4. External services on this site

Besides cookies, for some components your browser loads files from an external party. Your IP address is then visible to that party, even when no cookie is placed.

• Adobe Fonts supplies the fonts of this site.
• Cloudflare Turnstile checks, when a form is submitted, that you are not an automated program.
• PostHog measures use of the site and processes those data within the European Union; without your consent for statistics, nothing is stored on your device in doing so.
• Google Tag Manager and Google Maps are only loaded after you have accepted the corresponding category.

The contact, quotation and job application forms are part of this website itself: they load no external form services and place no cookies or trackers of their own.

5. What we measure without cookies

When an address requested on this site does not exist, or when you follow a shortened Westcool link, we record that: the address, the time, the referring page, your browser and device, and the country, region and city derived from your IP address. No cookies are used for this and nothing is read from or written to your device; your IP address is not stored but converted into a code that changes daily and that we cannot reverse.

General use of the site is likewise, without your consent, measured only in this way: PostHog then counts visits without storing anything on your device and without recognising you on a subsequent visit. That only changes once you accept the statistics category.

You can read more about this in our privacy policy.

6. Changes to this policy

If something changes in the services we use, we adapt this cookie policy. The date at the top of this page indicates when that last happened.