B2B Ecommerce
Patterson Companies
How We Separated Real Customers From Rep Orders in a B2B Ecommerce Funnel
- Business units audited: Dental, Veterinary, and Animal Health
- 3
- Add to cart routes, now separated by a source parameter
- 6
- Consent management implemented across every business unit
- TrustArc
The challenge
A funnel metric is only useful if the people in it are comparable, and Patterson Companies' were not. A territory representative logging in to place an order for a practice behaves nothing like a first-time customer, and a recurring catalogue reorder behaves nothing like either. All three arrived as the same add to cart event. Add to cart rate, purchase rate, and cart abandonment were therefore describing a population that does not exist: part shopper, part sales rep, part standing order. Nobody could tell whether a change to the storefront had helped a customer, because customers could not be isolated from the people ordering on their behalf.
What we did
- Audited the GA4 properties and Tag Manager containers across the Dental, Veterinary, and Animal Health business units, so three separate setups could be held to one standard.
- Implemented TrustArc consent management on every business unit, so tag behaviour follows a recorded choice rather than an assumption.
- Rebuilt the ecommerce data layer across the units, so the same event carries the same meaning wherever it fires.
- Catalogued all six routes into the cart and added a source parameter to each, turning one undifferentiated event into six that can be told apart.
- Rebuilt the funnel reporting on that parameter, so add to cart rate, purchase rate, and cart abandonment can be read for genuine customer sessions on their own.
The outcome
Patterson Companies can now read its ecommerce funnel for actual customers. The same reports also isolate representative-placed orders and recurring catalogue purchases, which are useful populations in their own right once they are no longer averaged into everyone else. The measurement is the deliverable here: no storefront change could be judged fairly until the people it was aimed at could be seen separately from the people ordering on their behalf.
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