Setting up a queue during a presale or busy moments helps manage the pressure on the ticketing system by preventing too many simultaneous transactions.
The queue is influenced by visitor traffic, including both human users and bots. While raising the visitor limit may seem beneficial, it can increase the risk of system overload. Improvements to the queue technology and communication are ongoing to enhance user experience.
What is the Queue?
The queue is a preventive measure to limit the number of transactions processed by a ticketing system within a short period. This helps prevent system overload. The capacity of a ticketing system to handle multiple transactions concurrently varies per system.
In exceptional cases, the queue can also serve to protect the server it is hosted on from the website itself.
Much of the information available on the website is linked to the ticketing system, including account logins, prices, and seat availability. While bookings place the most strain on the ticketing system, other web pages also contribute to the overall system pressure to some extent.
Queue Numbers v Google Analytics
As the queue is a preventive tool, the potential pressure on the system can only be estimated approximately. It is impossible to measure exactly how many people have opened a page, we can only see when new pages are requested. This value is also approximate.
How many visitors you measure partly depends on how much time you give someone to view a page before clicking on an item. Google Analytics uses a very short period (less than a minute). The Peppered Queue gives someone more time, up to fifteen minutes. If a visitor stays inactive (no click) on a page for longer than this, they would be send back to the queue.
As a result, you will have lower visitor numbers according to Google Analytics than what appears in the Peppered Queue. It is important to note there is nothing wrong with either number, the way in which the estimate is made is very decisive for the outcome. We added a graph in the Dashboard that indicates the pressure according to the Peppered visitor count. This gives a good overview of the number of visitors on the site and in the queue.
Managing Traffic
The Maximum concurrent sessions feature allows you to set the number of visitors permitted on the website simultaneously. You can choose any number, typically between 0 and 1,500, depending on the nature of the expected visits.
Best Practices and Scenarios
Business as usual
During normal business operations, when you don't anticipate any unusual events, set your queue limit high enough to prevent it from activating unnecessarily. Choose a number that's higher than your average “regular” number of visitors. This setting varies depending on your specific situation, but common ranges are between 500 and 1000 visitors. Keep in mind that an excessively high limit can cause problems if there's a sudden traffic surge.
Periods of extra exposure
Media attention for your website, an artist announcing a new tour or a large newsletter can suddenly increase traffic to your website. When the nature of this traffic is primarily to find information and content (not purchasing tickets), your ticketing system won’t be affected that much.
This traffic will not visit your website all at the same time. The timing of the visits is more organic, as visitors will trickle in over an extended period.
Your website can handle a great deal of requests and visits at the same time. So there is really no need for a queue here. If you want to prepare for such a period, its smart to set your queue to a higher max, like 1000 or even more. Don’t forget to switch back to your default settings after the spike in traffic is over.
On-sale of Single or Small number of Events
Pre-sales are tricky, as they directly influence your ticketing system, which might need a bit of protection, depending on the system. Make sure you know about the performance of your ticketing system and follow the advice of your ticketing partner.
Start with a small number of visitors and gradually increase the capacity of the website (and ticketing system) over time. The first spike, when the event goes on sale, is usually the most critical period, as multiple visitors will start the purchase at the same time.
To prepare for an on-sale, you might want to set the queue to a lower amount first, like 50 or 100, and slowly increase this, depending on how fast orders are being processed in your ticketing system.
If you want to offer a fair chance for every visitor, you can set your queue limit to zero before the on-sale starts, and use the shuffle queue feature to create a random order of waiting visitors. Then slowly increase the limit to let visitors on your website in this new random order. You can add a notice in queue to inform visitors that there will be a shuffle.
On-sale of Large number of Events or Season/Festival
The same caution should be applied as the above on-sale scenario, with the exception of the seatmap note. When visitors spread out over multiple events during the on-sale, it is less likely they all end up in the same seatmap.
The onsale journey typically lasts a lot longer per visitor, so keep increasing your queue based on the speed in which orders come into your ticketing system.
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