In our article about Peak Sales, we explain why there is a Queueing system and how to interpret the numbers.

You can find the Queuing module on the first page when entering your Dashboard:

At the top of the module, you can see the number of visitors on the website at this moment (green) and the number of people in the queue (yellow if the queue is active).

From the the left, you can see the progress to the most recent period in 5-minute steps. On the right, you can see the most current situation.

Here, you can set how many visitors are allowed on the website simultaneously. You can choose from multiple settings between 0 and 1000.

You can change the number yourself. Please note that if you change the number downwards, people can enter the queue from the website if the new limit is lower than the current number of people on the website. You better start with fewer penumberntering websites, 50 for example, and increase the number if needed.

To allow more visitors to your website, you can easily change the number, for example, to 500.

If you are expecting a lot of people, please open a Service Ticket, they can bring your maximum sessions even higher if needed.

There is not a clear way to determine how many website visitors there are. If someone shows no activity for a while, is this person still there? Or did the visitor close the browser window? It cannot be predicted with certainty, so to be safe, Peppered allows for an inactivity of 10 minutes before we regard the visitor as inactive and remove the web session to make room for other visitors. If the visitor suddenly returns after 10 minutes of inactivity, the next page load will immediately open the queue page. After the order is finalised, the visitor loses his session and will be placed back in the queue if they want to continue browsing.

The website uses more conservative assumptions than Google. Google Analytics may show fewer people on the website because a shorter time of inactivity will result in the visitor not being counted any more by GA. However, the visitor might still be there.

There is also no clear way to determine how many visitors are in the queue. We cannot measure any activity in the queue because visitors have to wait and do nothing.

When you wait for your turn, the browser automatically redirects you to the website, and you can start your order. As long as you show activity every 10 minutes, you will be counted in the “on the website” statistics.

When visitors leave their queue page in the browser open but forget about it, they will eventually be referred to the website, where they will be removed after an inactivity of 10 minutes.

When a visitor closes the queue browser window, we cannot redirect that visitor to the website to start a website session, so the visitor will stay registered in the queue and become a “ghost”. These sessions will eventually time out, but that can take quite some time. It is not uncommon that this creates a more significant number in the queue than the actual number of people still actively waiting. It is a deliberate choice not to remove these “ghosts” since we cannot be sure if the visitor is still waiting or not, and the last thing you want is for people who have waited a long time to be moved back up the order in the queue.

The sensible thing to do here is to check the number of visitors “on the website”. If that number is significantly lower than the “maximum current sessions”, the queue is not letting enough people through because of these “ghosts”. This will be an excellent time to raise the “maximum current sessions”. This will allow a new group of waiting people on the website, including the “ghosts”, that will time out after 10 minutes since they will not be active on the website (because they have already left).

Here’s an example of how to manage the final phase of your queuing period:

The most prominent functionality here is the link to the website, with which you can bypass the queue and always be able to access the website. This is based on your dashboard login and IP address and is, therefore, inaccessible to others.

You can view the queue via the preview queue page link, even if the queue is not active.

You can place a message in the queue by scheduling a news item with the type notice in queue**. This is immediately shown to all the people waiting in the queue. This way, you can communicate actively about the current busy ticket sales situation (for instance, to inform which events are already sold out so that some visitors might not need to wait any longer).

This function shuffles all active sessions and gives each session a new place in a random order. This applies to all website visitors and all those waiting. This is ideal if you want to provide all visitors with an equal chance of access. Then, an X number of people are randomly forwarded to the website (the X is the same as the set queue limit). The other visitors get a new place in the queue.

It is advisable to set the queue to zero earlier and to communicate in a queue news item that there will be shuffling at a particular moment and that there is no point in waiting in line for a long time in advance, hoping to access the website sooner.

Changes made to the queue are visible at the bottom of the module, so there is a clear picture of who has done what at which moment. This is why you always have a clear overview.

Want to know more about how it works? See the extra explanation page.