Critical Role

Critical Role’s Marketing Transformation

The Challenge

Critical Role is a superstar of fan engagement, but its digital marketing was not keeping pace with the enthusiasm. New customer growth was in decline, down 64% year over year as of May 2025.

Part of the challenge was the ecosystem. Critical Role is not just one website, it is many. The content hub is CritRole.com, home to the shows, podcasts, and fan community. Beacon.tv and its apps are the subscription streaming service. Five regional web stores at shop.critrole.com sell merch and collectibles worldwide. DarringtonPress.com is the tabletop game publishing arm. Daggerheart.com is its flagship tabletop RPG system with its own dedicated audience. Maximizing customer value across the entire ecosystem requires unified marketing infrastructure, measurement, and messaging that connects visitors throughout their whole journey.

When Labyrinth began working with Critical Role, their digital marketing infrastructure wasn’t working properly. GA4 was counting traffic multiple times across the US Shopify, EU Shopify, and Beacon sites. UTMs were inconsistent. Conversion goals were being miscounted, making it hard to tell which channels were driving revenue. Paid media ran sporadically, with heavy reliance on branded search, minimal creative assets, and no evergreen strategies implemented. Email had a welcome series, with minimal browse and cart flows, and no post purchase, win back, or reengagement flows. Reporting was manual, built by hand in spreadsheets, which made it slow to see how any channel was actually performing.

Labyrinth’s Services

Growth Coaching
Reporting & Channel Performance Insights
Ecommerce Optimization
Multi-Channel Dashboards
Marketing Technology Audit & Roadmap
Paid Media Management
Paid Media Creative
Email Marketing

The Solution

Labyrinth Digital began by auditing the analytics, advertising, and email infrastructure, then we rebuilt the digital foundation before scaling ad spend.

To address gaps in measurement, we resolved Google tracking issues for key eCommerce events, cleaned up Klaviyo tracking, and implemented a flexible Google Tag Manager container that enabled tracking behavior on events occurring off the Critical Role properties. With a stronger tracking foundation in place, we expanded measurement beyond eCommerce to include Beacon, Daggerheart, Darrington Press, and live events. We built a centralized dashboard for ad spend, purchases, and new customer growth so the team had one view of performance, instead of a different look from each platform.

For paid media, we moved the brand from occasional bursts of effort to an evergreen strategy of always-on advertisement. Evergreen campaigns were launched for merch, Daggerheart, Beacon, and Darrington Press. Prospecting and retargeting ads run continuously to enable algorithmic learnings. For Google, we set up the product feed for shopping placements, implemented Performance Max and Shopping campaigns, added audience targeting, and put spend into search, display, and YouTube. Creative was designed specifically for each channel. In early 2026, we launched Reddit and Spotify advertising as well.

For email, we re-wrote regional rules to automatically sort people into the proper region without suppressing them. We created a preference center to allow for cross-list, regional, and qualitative building of customer preferences, created clean lists of each newsletter to improve deliverability, and structured unsubscribes to correspond to the correct action within Critical Role, Beacon, and Darrington Press. We created a pop-up to encourage sign-ups. From there, we created value balance through campaigns and flows. We implemented key lifecycle flows, including welcome for the different properties, as well as browse and cart abandonment. Then, we added a post-purchase nurture, templates for weekly newsletters, and delivered specialized campaigns for product drops, key sales, and seasonal content.

We supported growth marketing across the business. We helped organize and pull data for pricing of holiday sales to meet revenue goals, structured and organized site categories for targeted marketing alignment, and analyzed slow moving products to identify price improvement opportunities. We looked at sell through rate and inventory over time to determine future product inventory. We separated and tracked Daggerheart vs. Exandria sales to determine success across different goals. Finally, we reported and tracked new customers by product to understand IP interests of new customers.

The Results

With support from Labyrinth Digital, new customer growth rebounded in Q3 and Q4 of 2025, improving from a 64% YoY decline to 22% YoY growth by year-end.

Revenue from paid ads increased +85% YoY. We found that leveraging paid advertising did not cannibalize organic traffic. Overall email revenue increased +12% YoY, driven by the addition of flow revenue. Our campaigns averaged a 2.3% click rate, against 1.1% for the program overall. Even non-sale emails drove additional revenue. The 2025 holiday season sold out the store, including several legacy products that had been slow to sell.