Data Usage & Tracking Policy
Effective Date: January 15, 2025
At SparklyNode, we want you to understand exactly how we track your activity on sparklynode.com. This page explains what tracking technologies we use, why we use them, and how you can control them.
We use cookies and similar technologies to make our site work properly and to understand how people use our financial education platform. Some of these are essential for basic functions — others help us improve your experience.
What Are Cookies and Tracking Technologies?
Cookies are small text files that websites place on your device. They help sites remember information about your visit, like your preferences or login status.
We also use similar technologies like pixels, local storage, and analytics scripts. These all fall under what people commonly call "cookies" — though technically they work a bit differently.
When you visit sparklynode.com, these technologies collect information about your device, browsing behavior, and how you interact with our educational content. This helps us understand what's working and what needs improvement.
Types of Tracking We Use
Essential Cookies (Always Active)
Analytics Cookies (Can Be Declined)
We use Google Analytics to see which pages get the most traffic, how long people spend reading our financial analysis guides, and where visitors tend to drop off.
This data is anonymous and aggregated. We can't identify individual users — we just see patterns like "500 people visited the cash flow analysis page this week" or "most people leave after viewing three pages."
- _ga: Distinguishes unique visitors (lasts 2 years)
- _gid: Distinguishes unique visitors for 24 hours
- _gat: Throttles request rate to prevent server overload (lasts 1 minute)
Functional Cookies (Can Be Declined)
These remember your preferences — like whether you prefer light or dark mode, or which language you've selected. They make your experience more personalized without being invasive.
If you decline these, the site will still work, but you'll need to set your preferences every time you visit.
- theme_preference: Remembers your display settings
- course_progress: Saves where you left off in educational modules
- calculator_settings: Remembers your default currency and calculation preferences
Marketing Cookies (Can Be Declined)
These track you across different websites to show you relevant ads. For example, if you view our financial ratio analysis course, you might see ads for it on other sites you visit.
We use marketing pixels from Google Ads and Facebook to measure whether our advertising campaigns actually bring in students who find our content valuable.
- _fbp: Facebook pixel for ad targeting
- IDE: Google DoubleClick for ad serving
- fr: Facebook ad delivery and analytics
How Tracking Improves Your Experience
Here's what we actually do with this data. When we see that 80% of visitors abandon our equity valuation calculator halfway through, we know we need to simplify it. When we notice people frequently search for "working capital management," we create more content on that topic.
Analytics help us understand which financial concepts confuse people. If we see lots of time spent on a particular paragraph, we know it's either really interesting or really confusing — so we test clearer explanations.
We also track which devices people use. If we see increasing mobile traffic, we prioritize making our financial calculators work better on phones. That kind of thing.
How Long We Keep Tracking Data
Analytics data gets automatically deleted after 26 months. We don't need to know what you did three years ago — recent patterns tell us what we need to know about improving the site.
Essential cookies last only as long as necessary. Session cookies disappear when you close your browser. Security tokens expire after 24 hours. Login states last 30 days so you don't have to sign in constantly.
Marketing cookies typically last 90 days. After that, the tracking networks consider the data too old to be useful for ad targeting anyway.
Managing Cookies Through Your Browser
Every browser lets you control cookies. You can block all of them (though this breaks many websites), block third-party cookies only, or delete existing cookies whenever you want.
Here's where to find these settings in common browsers:
- Chrome: Settings → Privacy and security → Cookies and other site data
- Firefox: Options → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data
- Safari: Preferences → Privacy → Manage Website Data
- Edge: Settings → Cookies and site permissions → Manage and delete cookies
You can also use private browsing mode, which automatically deletes cookies when you close the window. Or install browser extensions that block tracking scripts entirely.
Third-Party Services
We embed content from YouTube for educational videos. YouTube places its own cookies when you play a video — we don't control those, but we use YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode when possible.
Our payment processor for course enrollments uses cookies to prevent fraud and process transactions securely. Those are managed by the payment provider, not us.
We also use Cloudflare for security and performance. They set cookies to identify malicious visitors and protect against DDoS attacks.
Changes to This Policy
We update this page when we add new tracking technologies or change how we use existing ones. The effective date at the top tells you when we last made changes.
If we make significant changes — like adding a new advertising network — we'll notify active users by email and display a notice on the site for 30 days.