BETTER INSIGHTS
York Theatre Royal came to us with a top-secret project: Gary Oldman returning to the theatre to star in Krapp’s Last Tape, a one-person show running from April to May 2025.
We all know how busy ticket sites get on release dates, like My Neighbour Totoro for the theatre or Oasis on TicketMaster with their dynamic pricing and endless queuing. That wasn’t a Champagne Supernova, was it?
It’s not often that you get an A-list celebrity performing an exclusive run, and York Theatre Royal wanted to know that their site would be able to handle the interest and traffic that came through.
We worked with the Spektrix ticketing service team and York Theatre Royal to come up with some solutions not only for the server but for the user journey as well.
As tickets were going to be released at different times for members and the general public, ‘we needed to make sure both we and the site were prepared, each step of the way.
BETTER IDEAS
To kick things of, we cloned their current server onto two identical servers and put a load balancer between them. In simple terms, we created a virtual traffic warden to ease the load and divide the traffic across the two servers. The existing database was also updated to handle more processing, in anticipation for the show being announced.
Next, we reviewed the primary purchasing journey and made some further user experience suggestions to help boost awareness and ticket sales. We changed the banner at the top of the site to include a link to more information on ticket release dates and blog announcements.
The show listing page was given an extra call to action, which enabled us to add additional links surfacing content around ticket release dates, blog posts and encourage further membership signups, for those wanting to secure tickets ahead of general release. This helped us effectively manage the awareness of ticket release dates.
Finally, we integrated York Theatre Royal’s newsletter sign ups to Spektrix’s database, to allow for enhanced management, reporting and analysis. We’d worked with Spektrix previously, integrating York Theatre Royal’s ticket sales database into the live site, so were well aware of the great functionality the system provides.
