Key Takeaways:
- Fanatics captures data from over 100 million fans across commerce, collectibles, betting and live events — and its partnership with Rokt turns those signals into personalized purchasing moments at checkout.
- FanGraph, Fanatics’ first-party data layer, unifies team loyalties, purchase history and betting activity into a single fan profile, enabling segmentation that goes far beyond broad demographic targeting.
- Rokt’s relevance engine, which processes more than 7.5 billion transactions annually across its network, delivers highly relevant offers before and after checkout, generating new revenue opportunities.
Many fans go beyond just following their favorite sports teams; they make them a part of their everyday life. They browse player stats between innings, bet before tip-off, and order a jersey the second the game ends. That constant movement generates a staggering volume of behavioral data. Fanatics, in partnership with Rokt, has been quietly building the infrastructure to turn all of it into revenue.
How Does FanGraph Unify Fan Data for Product Discovery?
The engine behind Fanatics’ personalization strategy is FanGraph, a first-party data layer that pulls together fan behavioral data from every corner of the Fanatics ecosystem — commerce, collectibles, sportsbook and live events. Team loyalties. Player affinities. Purchase history. Betting activity. All of it runs directly into a single, unified fan profile.
That matters because it changes what targeting actually means. Rather than serving generic promotions to broad sports audiences, Fanatics can push player-specific merchandise to fans whose recent searches signal rising interest in a particular athlete. The product suggestion then feels relevant. Not like an ad.
FanGraph also powers an advertising network that gives brands access to audiences filtered by actual buying and betting behavior — a fundamentally different pitch than the standard “sports fan” segment most platforms sell.
What Does Rokt’s Technology Do at the Fanatics Checkout?
Rokt specializes in what the company calls the Transaction Moment — the window from selection to confirmation when customer attention, trust, and purchase intent peak simultaneously. Fanatics taps two Rokt products to operate inside that window.
Rokt Pay+ works on the payment page, analyzing real-time transaction data to surface relevant offers without disrupting the purchase flow. Rokt Thanks activates after purchase confirmation, creating additional engagement during the post-checkout phase. A fan who just bought a jersey might be offered a matching cap at a price that incentivizes them to make an additional purchase.
Rokt’s network processes more than 7.5 billion transactions annually and is trusted by Live Nation, PayPal, Uber, Macy’s and HelloFresh, among others. Fanatics plans to expand to include Rokt Ads and Rokt Catalog across additional areas of the business.
“Fanatics’ focus remains on relentlessly enhancing the fan experience, and that includes constantly thinking of ways to make shopping with us more seamless and relevant,” said Michael Rubin, CEO of Fanatics, in the partnership announcement. “Rokt’s technology will help us deliver on our promise to fans.”
Rokt CEO Bruce Buchanan called Fanatics’ return to the network significant — noting the partnership would “unlock even greater relevance throughout the ecommerce journey.”
Timing is the Real Product
Personalization without timing is just a good guess. Fanatics knows this.
The company’s collaboration with Google Cloud, using Vertex AI Search for Commerce, identifies peak moments of purchase intent — a spike in searches after a dramatic game win, for example — and surfaces the right merchandise before a fan consciously registers the desire to buy. Every year during March Madness alone, Fanatics adds thousands of new products over a three-week period. Without precise search quality, those launches get buried. With it, they convert.
Even when customers actively visit the site searching for gear, if they can’t find exactly what they’re looking for, they’ll quickly bounce. The Google Cloud integration fixes that—pairing search-intent signals with Fanatics’ knowledge of individual fan preferences to match the right product to the right moment.
What This Partnership Signals for Sports Ecommerce
Fanatics generated an estimated $9.6 billion in revenue in 2025 and is projecting to exceed $13 billion in 2026. At that scale, even marginal improvements in checkout relevance translate to considerable revenue.
The Rokt partnership isn’t a standalone experiment. It sits alongside Fanatics’ Google Cloud integration, its FanGraph data infrastructure and an expanding global footprint spanning North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Together, these form a commerce stack built around one principle: meet the fan at the exact moment they’re ready to buy.
For competitors, that stack is hard to replicate quickly. First-party data at the scale of 100 million fans, behavioral signals from a betting and collectibles ecosystem, and a checkout relevance engine processing billions of transactions.
That’s the real story here. Fanatics and Rokt aren’t just personalizing product pages. They’re looking to rebuild the architecture of fan commerce around intent.
(Note: AI assisted in summarizing the key points for this story.)