Blast Analytics and Marketing

Code of Ethics

Supporting Leaders to EVOLVE

Blast’s mission is to support leaders to EVOLVE their organizations. We’re driven by our passion to help enterprise clients do more of what works — and less of what doesn’t.

We’re equally driven to do what is right — and not what is easy.

Many industries have professional standards of conduct to help guide members of their respective communities by giving them guidelines to aspire to, and guidance in navigating ethically challenging situations. Specifically in the digital analytics industry, the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) has published The Web Analyst’s Code of Ethics. Blast agrees with the DAA Code of Ethics, and as analytics consultants we have additional guiding principles when working with our clients.

We hold ourselves to these standards because we take responsibility for protecting the companies we consult with, protecting their customers, and protecting the reputation of our company and the analytics industry at large. These ethical guidelines contribute to open, trusting, and collaborative relationships with our clients.

The Blast Analyst Code of Ethics centers around three themes:

  1. Privacy. Blast promises:
    1. to protect your customers’ data.
    2. not to collect data for the sake of collecting data.
    3. to stay informed of privacy legislation.
  2. Integrity. Blast promises:
    1. to strictly enforce data quality.
    2. not to falsely interpret, fabricate, or embellish data.
    3. to thoroughly explain and document your data.
  3. Honesty. Blast promises:
    1. to tell the truth, even when it is bad news.
    2. to be forthright and accountable if we make mistakes.
    3. to follow the golden rule.

Privacy

Blast promises to protect your customers’ data.

Customers are providing personally identifiable and highly sensitive information to our clients. We vow to safeguard any sensitive information that you provide to us about your business. We also vow to inform you of any personally identifiable information that may be inadvertently collected and violate a product’s terms of service. We will educate our clients about consumer data collection practices and laws, and advise them to keep customer data safe, private, and secure.

Scenario

“The client wants to collect email addresses in Google Analytics.”

The Wrong Way

“Let’s track email addresses in custom dimension 14.”

The Blast Way

“Collecting email addresses is against Google’s terms of service and unnecessarily exposes personally identifiable information. If they truly need a user identifier and they don’t have a non-PII user ID, we must hash the value before it is captured in GA.”

Blast promises not to collect data for the sake of collecting data.

While conventional wisdom might suggest that more data is better, we know that collecting unnecessary data is both risky and rarely provides useful insights. Focusing on capturing critical data points yields higher quality data, and reduces the chance that highly sensitive data is being captured unintentionally. We will advise our clients on what data they should – and shouldn’t – collect and avoid the “capture it all” mentality.

Scenario

“The client wants to track every single click.”

The Wrong Way

“Let’s just set up an automated click-tracking solution.”

The Blast Way

“This is a banking website and some of the click text contains account numbers. Let’s work with the client to determine what user actions are truly critical and design a robust tracking strategy around that.”

Blast promises to stay informed of privacy legislation.

Laws regarding consumer data privacy are rapidly changing and the penalties for non-compliance are severe. Since websites and mobile apps are accessible from anywhere in the world, it becomes a challenge to understand which laws apply to which users and which sites/apps. We will keep ourselves informed of consumer data privacy legislation to better partner with our clients and their legal teams to comply with regulations.

Scenario

“The client wants to know if they need to do anything to be compliant with GDPR.”

The Wrong Way

“They’re a US company, so we don’t need to worry about GDPR.”

The Blast Way

“Even though our client is a US company, they do have visitors from the EU. Let’s review what countries the visitors are coming from and provide that info to help them determine the best privacy policy for their customers. Let’s also inform our client of upcoming US privacy laws they should be aware of.”

Integrity

Blast promises to strictly enforce data quality.
Insights are only as good as the data behind them, and we take data quality very seriously. On the data collection side, we focus our efforts on designing, implementing, and validating data to ensure it is accurate, actionable, and trustworthy. We don’t blindly trust the data in the tool, but have a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what drives those numbers, how to accurately pull reports, and challenge the data when it doesn’t add up.

Scenario

“This data point doesn’t look right.”

The Wrong Way

“This report is due tomorrow morning so I’ll just send it over, anyway. They won’t notice.”

The Blast Way

“I’m going to add a notation to this analysis explaining why I think this particular data point is inaccurate, how big of an impact it has on the data, and a tagging recommendation on how to correct it.”

Blast promises not to falsely interpret, fabricate, or embellish data.

Using data in a manner that is careless, uninformed, biased, or intentionally misleading is at best negligent, and at worst completely illegal. We recognize that there is cognitive bias in decision making and analysis, and strive to be a neutral third party by interpreting data independent from such bias, political pressure, or a sense of self-preservation.

Scenario

“The client is going to be disappointed that visitors aren’t clicking on the products in the homepage carousel.”

The Wrong Way

“I’ll just report conversion rate rather than click-through rate so it looks more positive.”

The Blast Way

“We need to help them understand that their visitors don’t interact with the carousel. We can help them find different areas of the site to focus on that will have a bigger impact on conversion.”

Blast promises to thoroughly explain and document your data.

Without an understanding of how and where data is collected on your site or app, your ability to interpret the data and find true insights will be hindered. We will provide documentation written in non-technical language that outlines the data collection to empower our clients to have a complete understanding of their datasets.

Scenario

“The client wants to understand the details of their data collection.”

The Wrong Way

“We don’t have time to document all this. The client can look at the configurations in the tag manager if they need to understand how and where this data point is collected.”

The Blast Way

“We will create business-focused documentation for every implementation so that everyone understands the data and can interpret it accurately.”

Honesty

Blast promises to tell the truth, even when it is bad news.

It is our goal to help our clients optimize and improve their marketing efforts and online conversions, and in a perfect world we would always be able to show continuous progress and growth. But in those times when marketing or site performance doesn’t improve, we will share the findings even if it’s not what our clients hoped to hear. Even if it was our idea that didn’t work. We strongly believe it is better to provide honest bad news and recommendations for improvement, rather than provide false good news. And when there is bad news to share, we’ll never surprise you at an inopportune time or share with the broader client team before briefing our main client stakeholder.

Scenario

“Our client’s revamped site just launched, and they want to know how much conversion rates have increased. But conversion rates are actually down!”

The Wrong Way

“If I narrow the data to the 3 days when there was a free shipping promo, it will tell a positive story.”

The Blast Way

“We found that people are getting stuck on the billing page and not making it further into checkout. We’ll bring this to the client’s attention, and recommend a few A/B testing ideas on ways to improve conversion.”

Blast promises to be forthright and accountable if we make mistakes.

We do everything we can to be thorough and accurate, but we are human and inevitably mistakes will happen: we might forget to add a segment to a report after it was already sent out or one of our slides might have a typo. If we make mistakes, we will own up to them and do everything we can to correct the situation.

Scenario

“We thought the client wasn’t publishing the data layer changes until next week, but they went live early this morning. The accompanying tag manager updates haven’t been published yet, so the new data isn’t being collected.”

The Wrong Way

“The client hasn’t noticed, so let’s just fix it before they figure it out.”

The Blast Way

“When we were doing QA on the changes that were scheduled to go live next week, we saw that the data layer was already in production. The client hasn’t noticed that those reports have no data, so we need to draft an email to the client explaining the issue, what the impact to the data is, and when we expect to have it resolved.”

Blast promises to follow the golden rule.

We would never advise a client to make a decision that we wouldn’t make for our own business. When we partner with clients, we approach all aspects of every project as though we were a member of your organization and make every effort to set you up well for the future.

Scenario

“The client’s current tracking is brittle and the data requires a lot of cleanup to be usable. But they don’t want to upgrade the tracking because it will make it difficult to trend data year over year.”

The Wrong Way

“If they don’t want to change it, we’ll just leave it as is.”

The Blast Way

“We need to help them understand that being inconvenienced for a year is better than continuing to use flawed data indefinitely. Let’s mock up what cleaned up reports would look like, and how we can help them manage the year over year comparisons.”

Our Promise

We promise to follow this code of ethics along with analytics industry professional standards in order to protect our clients, their customers, and ourselves, and to strengthen the trust and relationships with everyone we work with.

Ready To Do More With Your Data?

If you have questions or you’re ready to discuss how Blast can help you EVOLVE your organization, talk to an Analytics Consultant today.

Call 1 (888) 252-7866 or contact us below.