Summary
Time-sensitive campaigns such as Chuseok promotions and reservation openings can generate sudden traffic spikes when app push notifications, ads, and other marketing channels go live at the same time.
Marketing teams should share campaign launch times, messaging schedules, and expected traffic, while IT teams need to confirm peak concurrent users and the processing capacity of critical customer journeys such as login, inventory checks, and payment.
Before launch, teams should validate system performance against actual customer journeys, queue legitimate users when traffic exceeds system capacity, and separately detect malicious bots and automated scripts.
Roles for adjusting admission rates, communicating with customers, and responding to incidents or bot activity should be defined in advance so that campaign traffic can translate into completed purchases, bookings, and applications.
Ahead of Chuseok and other seasonal peak periods, many online events begin at a fixed time—not only transportation ticket sales, but also hotel and travel bookings, gift-set promotions, coupon releases, and live commerce events. Companies may promote these campaigns simultaneously through app push notifications, SMS, email, paid advertising, and partner channels.
The challenge is that demand generated by the marketing team can reach the service all at once within a very short period. A campaign itself may be successful at attracting users, but if the website slows down or specific functions such as login, inventory lookup, or payment cannot process incoming requests, that traffic may fail to convert into actual purchases or bookings.
So what should marketing and IT teams review together before launching a Chuseok campaign?
What Should Marketing and IT Teams Align on Before a Chuseok Campaign?
What marketing and IT teams need to share is not simply an assumption that “we expect a lot of visitors.”
They need to align specifically on when users will arrive, which channels they will come from, how many users are expected, and which functions they are likely to use.
Estimate Peak Arrivals, Not Just Total Visitors
The total number of visitors targeted by a campaign is different from the amount of traffic the system must process at any given moment.
For example, a campaign that attracts 100,000 visitors evenly throughout the day places a very different load on the system from one where a large proportion of those users arrive within one minute of a launch notification. Even if the total number of visitors is the same, the impact on the system can be significantly different.
What the IT team needs, therefore, is not only a daily traffic target but also an estimate of when the highest concentration of users will arrive and how quickly that traffic will enter the service.
Based on previous campaign results and the current campaign plan, the marketing team can provide information such as:
Hourly traffic patterns from similar past campaigns
Audience size for app push notifications, SMS, and email
Advertising budget and estimated click volume
Number of users who signed up for advance notifications or waiting lists
Expected audience size from partner channels and live broadcasts
The IT team can then use this information to review concurrent users, requests per second, and the processing capacity of key functions such as login and payment.
If it is difficult to determine an exact figure in advance, it may be more realistic to prepare multiple scenarios—for example, conservative, baseline, and surge scenarios—rather than relying on a single forecast.
The key is not to stop at, “How many users will come?”
The better question is, “When will the most users arrive, and how quickly will they enter the service?”
Decide How to Handle Legitimate Users and Automated Requests When Capacity Is Exceeded
Once the system’s processing capacity has been identified, teams need to determine what should happen when actual demand exceeds expectations.
If a surge of legitimate users exceeds system capacity, rather than sending every user into the service at once, the company can allow only the number of users the system can safely process and temporarily queue the rest.
A virtual waiting room manages traffic flow by placing excess users in a queue and admitting them sequentially according to available system capacity.
The admission rate should be based not on the campaign’s total traffic target, but on the capacity of the actual bottleneck—such as login, booking, or payment.
When traffic remains below the configured threshold, users do not need to wait. The waiting room can be activated only when traffic exceeds the system’s processing limit.
STCLab’s NetFUNNEL is a traffic management solution that controls user inflow according to system capacity during large-scale traffic surges and guides excess users through a virtual waiting room before admitting them sequentially.
However, not every request generated during a Chuseok promotion or reservation event comes from a real customer.
Automated scripts may attempt to secure limited products or seats, repeatedly monitor prices and inventory, or issue coupons across multiple accounts.
These two situations therefore need to be handled differently:
Situation | Operational Goal | Response |
|---|---|---|
Large numbers of legitimate customers arrive at the same time | Maintain system stability while preserving access opportunities for legitimate users | Control admission through a virtual waiting room |
Macros or malicious automated requests generate traffic | Distinguish automated traffic from legitimate customers | Apply detection, additional verification, and blocking policies |
BotManager analyzes access environments and behavioral patterns to distinguish legitimate users from malicious bots and automated scripts, then allows, detects, verifies, or blocks requests according to configured policies.
Virtual waiting rooms and bot management are not competing technologies.
Bot management identifies and filters abnormal automated requests, while a virtual waiting room manages the admission rate of the remaining legitimate users according to system capacity.
For a more detailed explanation of which response is appropriate for different causes of traffic surges, see:
How to Keep Marketing Success from Turning into Service Downtime
When preparing for a seasonal campaign, marketing teams focus on reaching more customers, while IT teams focus on ensuring that the service can process incoming requests reliably.
Although their responsibilities may appear different, both teams ultimately share the same goal: enabling customers to complete purchases, bookings, and applications successfully.
Before launching a campaign, teams should be able to answer the following questions:
When will users arrive, and through which channels?
When is traffic expected to peak, and how large could that peak be?
Which customer journeys must be protected?
How much traffic can critical functions process reliably?
How will legitimate users and automated requests be handled when capacity is exceeded?
On the day of the campaign, who will monitor which metrics and make which decisions?
Campaign performance does not end with attracting a large number of users.
Customers must be able to enter the service without errors and successfully complete their purchases, bookings, or applications.
By connecting the marketing schedule with actual system capacity in advance, companies can turn concentrated Chuseok demand into business results rather than service downtime.
FAQ
Does Every Promotion Need a Virtual Waiting Room?
No. If expected peak traffic remains below system capacity and there is little risk of a sudden surge, there is no need to place users in a queue.
However, for events such as flash-sale launches, reservation openings, or coupon releases where users are likely to arrive at the same time—or where the peak load is difficult to predict—it may be worth evaluating traffic admission control in advance.
How Should We Estimate Campaign Traffic?
Review hourly traffic patterns from similar past campaigns, the audience size of app push notifications, SMS, and email, expected responses from advertising and partner channels, and the number of users registered for advance notifications.
Rather than estimating only daily visitors, it is important to forecast the range of traffic that may arrive immediately after the campaign opens or after major notifications are sent.
If We Scale Up Servers in Advance, Do We Still Need Traffic Control?
Scaling infrastructure can increase processing capacity, but it may not solve every bottleneck.
Login systems, databases, inventory services, payment systems, and external APIs may each have their own processing limits. Increasing overall server capacity alone may therefore not prevent failures.
Teams should first identify actual bottlenecks and peak processing limits, then determine whether infrastructure scaling, traffic admission control, or both are required.
Where Should a Virtual Waiting Room Be Applied?
A virtual waiting room does not necessarily need to be applied across the entire website.
Instead, deployment should be based on the campaign’s critical customer journey and actual bottlenecks. Functions such as login, coupon issuance, product lookup, booking, or payment may be prioritized when they experience concentrated demand and have a high business impact if they fail.
Does a Virtual Waiting Room Also Block Bots and Macros?
The primary role of a virtual waiting room is to manage the flow of users when demand exceeds system processing capacity.
Identifying automated requests, distinguishing them from legitimate users, and applying verification or blocking policies are functions of bot management.
For events where legitimate users and automated scripts arrive at the same time, both technologies may need to be considered together.
What Can the Marketing Team Prepare Without Technical Expertise?
The marketing team can provide campaign launch times, channel-by-channel messaging schedules and audience sizes, expected customer journeys, coupon and inventory plans, and customer communication messages.
The IT team can then use this information to define processing capacity, testing scope, traffic admission thresholds, and monitoring plans.
Which Metrics Should We Monitor on the Day of the Campaign?
In addition to total visitors, teams should monitor response times and errors for critical functions, waiting times, the number of users admitted into the service, and success rates for login, booking, and payment.
If bot management is in place, teams should also review automated traffic detection, verification, and blocking activity, as well as any impact on legitimate users.