Last updated: 20 August 2026
This policy explains what cookies and similar technologies we use on youradventurechallenge.com, what each one does, how long it lasts, and how you can control them. It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains more broadly how we handle personal information.
We have tried to write this in plain English rather than legal jargon. If anything is unclear, please get in touch and we will happily explain it.
- What cookies are
- Who we are
- Your choices and consent
- Strictly necessary cookies
- Analytics and performance cookies
- Advertising and targeting cookies
- Functional and embedded content
- First-party and third-party cookies
- Server-side and cookieless tracking
- Other technologies we use
- Third parties and their policies
- Managing cookies in your browser
- Opting out of advertising cookies
- Changes to this policy
- Contact us and your rights
1. What cookies are
A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store on your computer, tablet or phone. The next time you visit, your browser hands that file back, which is how a site can “remember” things — that you have already dismissed a message, for example, or that you arrived from a particular advert.
Cookies cannot run programs, carry viruses, or read anything else on your device. Most contain nothing more than a random string of characters that acts as a label.
Throughout this policy, when we say “cookies” we also mean closely related technologies that do a similar job:
- Local storage and session storage — a larger, longer-lived space in your browser that works much like a cookie but is not sent back to the server automatically.
- Tracking pixels (sometimes called web beacons or tags) — a tiny, invisible image or piece of code that tells a company such as Meta or Google that a particular page has been viewed.
- Device and browser signals — information your browser sends anyway, such as screen size, language and IP address, which can be combined to recognise a visit without a cookie.
2. Who we are
This website is operated by Your Adventure Challenge Limited, which is the data controller for the personal information described in this policy.
Your Adventure Challenge Limited
37 High Street, Tewkesbury, GL20 5BB
Registered in England and Wales, company number 14670942
Email: mark@youradventurechallenge.com
Telephone: 07586 884896
3. Your choices and consent
Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) and the UK GDPR, we may only place cookies on your device without asking first if they are strictly necessary for the website to work — for example, to keep your place as you move between pages, or to protect our forms from spam.
Every other cookie described in this policy — anything used for analytics, advertising or embedded content — is only placed after you have given your consent using the banner that appears when you first visit.
Changing your mind
You can withdraw or change your consent at any time, and it is as easy to say no as it is to say yes. To do so:
- Clear the cookies for this site in your browser and reload the page. Our consent banner will appear again and you can make a different choice. Section 12 below explains how to do this in each browser.
- Or email us at mark@youradventurechallenge.com and we will action your request.
Declining non-essential cookies will not stop you using any part of this website. It only means we will not be able to see how the site is performing, and any adverts you see elsewhere will be less relevant to you.
A note on the tables below. Cookie names sometimes carry a random or account-specific suffix — we have shown these as
*or in square brackets. Durations are the maximum life of the cookie; many are refreshed each time you visit, and all of them can be deleted by you at any time.
4. Strictly necessary cookies
No consent needed. These are required for the website to function and for our enquiry forms to work safely. They do not track you across other websites and are not used for marketing. They are set whether or not you accept the banner, because without them the site cannot operate.
| Cookie | Set by | What it does | Expires after |
|---|---|---|---|
PHPSESSID |
Your Adventure Challenge (WordPress) | Keeps track of your visit as you move from page to page. | End of browser session |
wordpress_test_cookie |
Your Adventure Challenge (WordPress) | Checks whether your browser will accept cookies at all. | End of browser session |
seopress-user-consent |
Your Adventure Challenge (SEOPress) | Records whether you accepted or declined non-essential cookies, so we do not keep asking you on every page. | 30 days |
_GRECAPTCHA |
Google (reCAPTCHA) | Protects our enquiry forms from automated spam and abuse by distinguishing real people from bots. | 6 months |
gform_* and related form cookies |
Your Adventure Challenge (Gravity Forms) | Security tokens that make sure a form submission genuinely came from you, and remember your progress if a form is partly completed. | Session to 30 days |
wordpress_logged_in_[hash], wordpress_sec_[hash] |
Your Adventure Challenge (WordPress) | Keeps a user signed in. Only set if you log in to the website — ordinary visitors never receive these. | Session, or 14 days if “Remember Me” is used |
wp-settings-[id], wp-settings-time-[id] |
Your Adventure Challenge (WordPress) | Remembers screen preferences inside the website administration area. Only set for logged-in administrators. | 1 year |
5. Analytics and performance cookies
Consent required. These help us understand how people find and use the website — which pages are read, which challenges attract the most interest, and which enquiries came from which piece of marketing. We use this to improve the site and to judge whether our marketing is worth continuing. We are not interested in you as an individual, and we do not sell this information to anyone.
| Cookie | Set by | What it does | Expires after |
|---|---|---|---|
unique_session_id |
AnalyticsWP (hosted by us) | Gives your browser a random label so we can tell a returning visitor from a new one and group your page views into a single visit. The information is stored in our own website database and is never sent to an outside company. The same label is also kept in your browser’s local storage. | 1 year |
_ga |
Google Analytics 4 | Distinguishes one visitor from another so visits can be counted without counting the same person twice. | 2 years |
_ga_Q251VY8B9M |
Google Analytics 4 | Keeps track of the state of your current visit for our specific Analytics property. | 2 years |
_gid |
Google Analytics | Distinguishes visitors over a shorter window. | 24 hours |
_gat_gtag_* |
Google Analytics | Limits how often data is sent to Google, to keep the site fast. | 1 minute |
pys_start_session, pys_session_limit |
PixelYourSite | Marks when your visit began and how long it should count as a single session for reporting. | Session / 30 minutes |
pysTrafficSource, last_pysTrafficSource |
PixelYourSite | Records where you arrived from — for example a Google search, a Facebook post, or by typing our address directly — and the source before that. | 7 days |
pys_landing_page, last_pys_landing_page |
PixelYourSite | Records the first page you landed on, so we can see which pages bring people to the site. | 7 days |
pys_first_visit |
PixelYourSite | Notes whether this is your first visit to the site. | 7 days |
pys_advanced_form_data |
PixelYourSite | Remembers which enquiry form you interacted with so a submission can be matched to the right page. | 7 days |
| Conversion Bridge session and attribution identifier | Conversion Bridge (hosted by us) | Records the sequence of pages you viewed before making an enquiry, so we can tell which marketing activity produced it. Depending on how it is configured this uses either a first-party cookie or a privacy-preserving cookieless method. | Up to 12 months |
__hstc |
HubSpot | HubSpot’s main visitor tracking cookie. Stores the domain, a visitor label, and the time of your first, previous and current visit. | 6 months |
hubspotutk |
HubSpot | Keeps track of a visitor’s identity so that when you submit an enquiry form it can be linked to your record rather than creating a duplicate. | 6 months |
__hssc |
HubSpot | Keeps track of the current session and whether the visit count should be increased. | 30 minutes |
__hssrc |
HubSpot | Works out whether you have restarted your browser since your last visit. | End of browser session |
6. Advertising and targeting cookies
Consent required. These allow us to measure whether our adverts work and to show relevant adverts to people who have shown an interest in charity and corporate challenges. They also let us avoid showing an advert to someone who has already enquired. They are set by Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google, who may use them to build a picture of your interests across the many websites they operate on.
| Cookie | Set by | What it does | Expires after |
|---|---|---|---|
_fbp |
Meta Pixel | Gives your browser a label that Meta uses to measure adverts and to show you relevant ones on Facebook and Instagram. | 90 days |
_fbc |
Meta Pixel | Stores the click identifier from a Meta advert if you arrived here by clicking one, so that any resulting enquiry can be credited to it. | 90 days |
pbid |
PixelYourSite | A random identifier passed to Meta alongside pixel and server events, so that the same visit is not counted twice. | 180 days |
pys_fb_event_id |
PixelYourSite | Gives each tracked action a unique reference so browser-side and server-side records of the same action can be matched and de-duplicated. | End of browser session |
_gcl_au |
Google Ads | Stores information about an advert click so that a later enquiry can be attributed to the correct campaign. | 90 days |
IDE |
Google (doubleclick.net) | Measures how you interact with adverts and helps Google show adverts that are more relevant to you. | Up to 13 months |
test_cookie |
Google (doubleclick.net) | Checks whether your browser supports advertising cookies. | 15 minutes |
NID, _gcl_* variants |
Stores advertising preferences and helps measure conversions across Google services. | Up to 6 months |
7. Functional and embedded content
Consent required. Some of our pages include content hosted by other companies — most commonly videos of our challenges. When that content loads, the company hosting it can set its own cookies, exactly as if you had visited their website directly. We only load this content once you have accepted cookies.
| Cookie | Set by | What it does | Expires after |
|---|---|---|---|
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE |
YouTube (Google) | Estimates your connection speed and remembers player preferences on pages with an embedded video. | 6 months |
YSC |
YouTube (Google) | Keeps a record of which embedded videos you have watched. | End of browser session |
VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA |
YouTube (Google) | Stores the cookie choice you have made on YouTube itself. | 6 months |
__Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN |
YouTube (Google) | Used by YouTube to manage the rollout of player features. | 6 months |
messagesUtk |
HubSpot | Recognises you if you use our live chat, so a conversation can be continued rather than starting again. | 6 months |
__cf_bm |
Cloudflare (on behalf of HubSpot) | Distinguishes people from bots to protect the chat and tracking services from abuse. | 30 minutes |
8. First-party and third-party cookies
You will sometimes see cookies described as “first-party” or “third-party”. The distinction matters less than it used to, and it is worth being straightforward about it.
- First-party cookies are stored under our own web address,
youradventurechallenge.com. - Third-party cookies are stored under someone else’s address, such as
doubleclick.netoryoutube.com.
Several of the cookies listed above — including Google Analytics’ _ga, Meta’s _fbp and HubSpot’s __hstc — are stored under our address but are created and read by code those companies provide, and the information in them is sent to those companies. We have listed them by the company that actually uses the data rather than by where the file happens to sit, because we think that is the more honest way round.
9. Server-side and cookieless tracking
Some measurement now happens on our web server rather than in your browser, which means it does not always rely on a cookie. We use this in two places, and we want to be upfront about it:
- Meta Conversions API. When you complete an enquiry form, our server sends a record of that event directly to Meta, in addition to anything the browser pixel sends. This exists so that measurement still works when a browser blocks cookies. Information that could identify you, such as an email address, is converted into an irreversible scrambled value before it is sent.
- Conversion Bridge. This can be configured to recognise a visit without setting a cookie, by combining ordinary browser signals such as your IP address, browser type and screen size.
Where these methods are used for anything other than a strictly necessary purpose, they are subject to the same consent choice as the cookies described above. If you decline non-essential cookies, we do not run them.
10. Other technologies we use
Local storage
Our self-hosted analytics keeps a copy of the unique_session_id label in your browser’s local storage as well as in a cookie. Local storage does not expire on its own, but it is cleared whenever you clear your browsing data, and we clear it if you decline cookies.
Web fonts
We use typefaces served by Adobe Fonts (use.typekit.net) and Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com). These do not set cookies, but loading a font means your IP address and basic browser information are sent to Adobe and Google so the file can be delivered. This is necessary for the site to display correctly.
Server logs
Like almost every website, our hosting provider keeps automatic records of requests made to the server, including IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting. These are not cookies, are not used for marketing, and are deleted on a routine cycle.
11. Third parties and their policies
The companies below may receive information about your visit. Each is responsible for its own use of that information, and each publishes its own privacy notice.
| Company | Used for | Their privacy information |
|---|---|---|
| Google (Analytics, Ads, reCAPTCHA, Fonts, YouTube) | Website analytics, advertising and measurement, spam protection, typefaces and video | policies.google.com/privacy |
| Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram) | Advertising and measurement via the Meta Pixel and Conversions API | facebook.com/privacy/policy |
| HubSpot | Customer relationship management, enquiry handling, email and chat | legal.hubspot.com/privacy-policy |
| Adobe (Adobe Fonts) | Typefaces used across the site | adobe.com/privacy/policy |
| Cloudflare | Bot protection for the services above | cloudflare.com/privacypolicy |
AnalyticsWP, Conversion Bridge, PixelYourSite, Gravity Forms and SEOPress are software we run on our own website rather than services that receive your data. Where they pass information onward — for example PixelYourSite sending an event to Meta — that onward transfer is covered by the entries above.
Transfers outside the UK
Several of these companies are based in the United States or process data there. Where that happens, transfers are made under the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or the standard contractual clauses recognised by the UK Government, depending on the provider.
12. Managing cookies in your browser
As well as using our consent banner, you can control cookies directly in your browser. You can block all cookies, block only third-party cookies, or delete everything already stored. Be aware that blocking all cookies will stop parts of most websites working properly, not just ours.
On a phone or tablet, the equivalent settings are usually found under Settings, then your browser, then Privacy.
Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
Some browsers can send a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signal. There is no agreed industry standard for how websites should respond to Do Not Track, so we cannot promise every third party listed above will honour it. Our own consent banner is the reliable way to tell us what you want, and we will always respect the choice you make there.
13. Opting out of advertising cookies
In addition to declining cookies here, you can limit advertising tracking at source:
- Google adverts — Google Ad Settings
- Facebook and Instagram adverts — ad preferences in your Meta Accounts Centre
- Google Analytics on every website — the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on
- Industry-wide opt-outs — Your Online Choices (UK and EU)
14. Changes to this policy
We review this policy whenever we add or remove a tool that uses cookies, and at least once a year. When we make a material change we will update the date at the top of the page and, where the change affects what you have already consented to, ask for your consent again.
15. Contact us and your rights
If you have a question about this policy, want to change your cookie choices, or would like to exercise any of your rights under the UK GDPR — including the right to access, correct or delete the information we hold about you — please contact us:
Your Adventure Challenge Limited
37 High Street, Tewkesbury, GL20 5BB
Email: mark@youradventurechallenge.com
Telephone: 07586 884896
We aim to respond to any request within five working days, and in any event within one month as the law requires.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator for data protection and cookies. You can reach them at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to put things right ourselves first.
For more detail on how we use personal information beyond cookies, please see our Privacy Policy.