Make sure you're cookie compliant

The types of cookies involved in using Dotdigital and how and when to use cookie management on your site.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over a week ago

Cookies are small bits of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. They help the website remember information about your visit, making it easier to revisit the site and the site more useful to you.

Some of our Dotdigital services use cookies. In line with the GDPR, we classify cookies as either essential or non-essential:

  • Essential cookies
    Essential cookies are required for a tool to work; without them, a user can’t successfully use the website that sets them. A typical example is an ecommerce site that uses a cookie to keep track of what’s in a user’s basket. Without the cookie, the basket would always be empty, and so the cookie is considered essential. You don’t need consent for essential cookies. Several of our tools use essential cookies and some, like Landing pages, only use essential cookies by default – making it straightforward to ensure compliance.

  • Non-essential cookies
    Non-essential cookies are used for tasks that are not vital – like monitoring user behaviour on a website or displaying advertisements to users. You must get consent from your users to use non-essential cookies. Some of our tools use non-essential cookies, so you must have a consent-gathering process in place before using these tools.


Cookies and Dotdigital

All the cookies used by Dotdigital's core services are essential. If you're only using these services, you don't have to use cookie management.

Our core services that use only essential cookies:

  • Email

  • Surveys, pages, and forms (when used without third-party services)

  • SMS

  • Transactional email

  • Chat

However, Dotdigital does have some add-on services that use non-essential cookies. To be GDPR compliant, you must get consent from your users for non-essential cookies.

Here's a list of our add-on services that use non-essential cookies:

  • Web behaviour tracking

  • Abandoned cart tracking

  • Site and ROI tracking

  • Surveys and forms (Retired)

To see a list of all cookies used to display Dotdigital features, check out the article Cookies that might be created on contacts' devices.


Using cookie management

To be compliant with GDPR, you need to get consent from your users for any non-essential cookies stored on your website. To do that, you need a cookie management solution.

A cookie management solution prevents cookies from being placed on a user's device until they give their consent. You can also let your users choose specifically what type of cookies they want to accept. This is a valuable step in making sure you're GDPR compliant.

You can apply cookie control through a third-party solution, such as Civic. However, you should be able to use any third-party cookie management tool on your site.

To learn more, check out Civic cookie control.

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