Cookies
Analytics: on for everyone
Google Analytics cookies (named _ga and _ga_ followed by an identifier) tell us which pages and comparisons get used, where visitors arrive from, and whether features like search actually help. Microsoft Clarity cookies (named _clck and _clsk) help us see how pages are used: how far people scroll, what gets tapped, where a page frustrates. Both are first-party analytics for improving MoneyHQ. Anything you type into a form is masked in Clarity’s recordings, and search terms are scrubbed of anything that looks personal before they’re measured. These run whatever you choose about ads.
Google Ads measurement: only if you say yes
MoneyHQ runs a few Google ads. The first time you visit, a small box asks whether Google Ads may measure them. If you accept, Google sets its conversion cookies (named _gcl_au, and _gcl_aw or similar when you arrived from one of our ads) so we can see whether a visit from an ad led to something useful: a click on a broadband or mobile deal, a click on a partner offer, a newsletter signup or an energy switch application. That is all they are used for.
If you reject, or never answer, those cookies are not set. Google may still receive a cookieless signal that one of those actions happened, with ad click identifiers removed, which it can only use to estimate totals. Either way, ad personalisation is switched off: no remarketing, no audiences built from your visit, no ads chosen because of what you looked at here.
Your answer is kept in your browser for 12 months (an item named mhq_consent), so we don’t ask on every page. After that, or if what we ask about changes, we ask again.
Changing your mind
Use (also at the foot of every page) to change your answer at any time. It takes one click either way, and saying no after saying yes deletes the Google Ads cookies from your browser.
The broadband and mobile comparison
The broadband and mobile comparisons on MoneyHQ are run by our comparison partner, whose software loads on those pages. It sets its own Google Analytics cookies (also named _ga and _ga_ followed by an identifier, but tied to the partner’s own account, not ours) so that clicks on deals can be counted and a purchase attributed to MoneyHQ, which is how we are paid for them. Those cookies exist only on the pages where the comparison appears. When you click a deal, the comparison tells the page which deal and which retailer you picked, and we count that click in our own analytics (and, only if you said yes, in Google Ads). Nothing you type into it (a postcode, an address) is stored by MoneyHQ.
When you leave MoneyHQ
Offers link out to providers’ own sites, which set their own cookies under their own policies. What happens there is governed by them, not us.
Your browser
You can block or clear cookies for any site in your browser’s privacy settings, and every mainstream browser lets you do it per site or wholesale. MoneyHQ works fine with cookies blocked entirely: nothing on the site needs them.