How cookies are used on this West Palm Beach chimney site
This site uses cookies for three specific purposes: keeping the site working correctly when you navigate between pages, measuring anonymous usage so we know which content is helpful, and supporting the advertising campaigns that bring new West Palm Beach homeowners to the site for the first time. Every cookie set falls into one of these three categories and respects the consent preference you select on first visit. If you decline non-essential cookies, the site continues to function fully — you do not lose access to any content or feature based on cookie preferences.
The technical cookies that keep the site working set things like which page you came from, whether you have already dismissed the cookie banner, and your preferred display mode if the site offers one. These cookies are not used for tracking and are set whether you accept marketing cookies or not. They expire within thirty days of inactivity and are deleted when you clear your browser history. They do not contain personally identifiable information beyond what you have voluntarily entered on the site (for example, the name you typed into the free-estimate form, which is held in browser memory only until you submit).
Analytics cookies — set only with your consent — let us measure things like how many West Palm Beach visitors looked at the chimney inspection page, how long they spent reading, and which other pages they visited. This data is aggregated and anonymous; we cannot see what any individual visitor did. We use the aggregated data to decide what content to write more of and what pages to improve. The analytics provider is Google Analytics 4 with the standard privacy-protective configuration, including IP anonymization and short data retention periods.
Marketing cookies and advertising attribution
When you arrive at this site after clicking a Google ad — searching for chimney repair West Palm Beach, for example, and clicking our ad in the results — a small attribution cookie is set so that if you eventually contact us through the site, our advertising platform knows the ad was effective. Without this attribution, we would have no way to measure which ads work and which do not, and we would either waste money on ineffective ads or stop running ads at all. The cookie does not track you across other websites and is not shared with any third party other than Google's ad system.
If you decline marketing cookies in our consent banner, ad attribution is disabled for your session. You can still arrive from a Google ad, still browse the site, and still contact us — we simply do not know that your contact originated from a specific ad campaign. From your perspective nothing changes about the experience or what we do with your information. From our perspective we lose the ability to credit the ad that brought you here, which over time makes our advertising less efficient and increases the cost we eventually pay per West Palm Beach customer acquired.
We do not use cookies for retargeting in the typical sense — we do not show you our ads on other websites after you have visited ours. Retargeting is a common practice in many industries; we have chosen not to use it for chimney services because the conversion window is long enough that retargeting is not cost-effective and the customer experience of being followed around the internet is not aligned with our brand voice. If retargeting were ever added in the future, it would be opt-in through the same consent mechanism currently used.
How long cookies stay on your device and how to remove them
Session cookies — the technical cookies that handle navigation and form state — last only until you close your browser tab and are deleted automatically. Consent preference cookies (remembering whether you accepted or declined non-essential cookies) last one year, then we ask again. Analytics cookies last up to two years by default but are dropped after fourteen months of inactivity per Google Analytics 4 standard settings. Marketing attribution cookies last ninety days, which is the standard ad-attribution window.
You can delete all cookies set by this site at any time through your browser's settings. The exact path varies by browser: in Chrome, Settings - Privacy and Security - Cookies and other site data - See all cookies and site data - search for our domain - delete; in Safari, Safari menu - Settings - Privacy - Manage Website Data - search for our domain - remove. Mobile browsers have similar paths. After deletion, the next visit to the site treats you as a first-time visitor and the consent banner re-appears.
You can also revoke your cookie consent at any time through the small cookie-preferences link in the site footer. Clicking it re-opens the consent panel and lets you change your selection. Any non-essential cookies set under your previous consent are deleted when you change your selection to a more restrictive one. The essential technical cookies cannot be disabled through this control because the site would not function without them, but they are deleted normally when you clear browser history.
Third-party cookies and what to expect from them
Beyond the analytics and ad-attribution cookies described above, this site sets no third-party cookies under default settings. We do not use social media tracking pixels (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok), we do not use behavioral profiling services, we do not use heat-mapping or session-recording tools, and we do not allow third-party advertisers to drop their own cookies through our site. The only third parties present in your browser's cookie storage from our site are Google Analytics and Google Ads, both governed by Google's published privacy terms and both controllable through the consent banner.
Embedded content (for example, a YouTube video on a blog post or a Google Maps embed on the contact page) may set its own cookies when the embedded content is loaded by your browser. We have configured embeds to use privacy-protective modes wherever the platform offers them — for YouTube, the youtube-nocookie domain is used; for Google Maps, the lightweight embed mode without personalized data. Even with these settings, the embedded provider receives some information (your IP address, the page where the embed was loaded) which is governed by their privacy policies rather than ours.
If you are particularly privacy-sensitive, we recommend using a privacy-focused browser (Firefox with strict tracking protection, Brave, or Safari with cross-site tracking prevention enabled) when browsing this site. These browsers block third-party cookies and tracking by default, which means the analytics and ad-attribution functions described above are suppressed automatically regardless of what you choose in our consent banner. The site continues to work fully in this mode and you receive a higher-than-usual level of privacy protection without any action required from us.