Getting Started with Waiting Rooms

This help guide will walk you through frequently asked questions about the Tradable Bits Waiting Room, and when you should set one up on a campaign.

What is a waiting room?

The Tradable Bits waiting room is an additional campaign stage added to our regular campaign flow that shields against a huge influx of visitors. You can think of it like a bouncer, who lets a group of fans into your campaign at a time. The waiting room prevents your campaign from erroring out or crashing due to a large volume of fans, as it is an additional stop-gap.

Which campaigns use a waiting room?

The TBits Waiting room is a feature available for all campaign types that require fans to share their PII. You can enable this feature in the campaign configuration section.

How do Tradable Bits waiting rooms work?

When you add a waiting room to your campaign, this is how it works for your fans:

1. Before the Campaign Start Time

• Gated Countdown: Like entry into an exclusive club, or the opening hour on Black Friday, the waiting room opens exactly at the configured start time of your campaign. Any fan that lands on your campaign page before the campaign’s start time will land on a page with a countdown timer.

2. Campaign is open

• Queue: As soon as the waiting room opens, fans are redirected to a queue and assigned a place in line. It’s first come, first serve for fans. This queue is what prevents the campaign from crashing if thousands of fans try to enter at once.
• Staggered Entries: The waiting room will let one group of fans into the main campaign at a time. The waiting period for these staggered entries lasts up to 30 seconds and will continue until the queue is empty.
• Entry! The fan can enter the campaign! Once a fan is let into the campaign, they can navigate away from the page and back without entering the queue again

When should you use a waiting room?

We recommend enabling the waiting room feature if you expect more than 20K fans in a few minutes. If you do not anticipate a big volume of fans within minutes, do not enable the waiting room - it adds one extra stage that your fans are required to move through.

How to configure a waiting room?

1. Go to your campaign > Configuration under Setup
2. Scroll down until you see Large Volume Handling
3. Enable the waiting room by toggling it on

Special use-case: Event Registration and Tradable Bits Waiting Rooms

Unlike other campaigns, Event Registration includes a limited number of passes that our system can take into consideration. This means that we know how many passes are left when fans enter the campaign and can notify them about ticket availability as they wait in the queue.

How is a Waiting Room different for Event Registration?

1. Waiting room admissions are based on pass availability. The waiting room will admit fans proportional to 20% of the remaining passes in the public section of the campaign. This means: if you have 1000 event reg passes left, we would let 200 fans in on the first round of entries, 160 in on the second, and so on.

2. Dynamic messaging on the queue page. As a fan waits in the queue, they can see whether passes are almost sold out, and so can anticipate a close call on getting a pass or not. If a fan enters the waiting room and all passes are gone, they will be notified right away.

3. Capacity-based waiting room flow is a way to customize the admission of fans flowing into your campaign based on availability. This feature is not available on all campaigns, it is designed specifically for Event Registration campaigns. 

And that's all about waiting rooms! If you have any unanswered questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact support@tradablebits.com