How about a referral contest? Make people refer friends and whoever has the most referrals by the end gets a couple of free months? Easy way to get some new players.
You could also make it so that every friend that a person refers that converts into a subscription gets a free month.
Example: Player A invites 5 friends to the game and 3 of them convert to a subscription, Player A gets 3 free months of gameplay.

lol sounds good

EDIT: I was just kidding.. :P

Kierky, don't ostracize people for posting suggestions! It's one of the first steps to getting really involved in the game. That said, I like nolonger's idea, though it is suggested about once every other week to no affect...

nolonger: it is a good idea, and it is something we want to do.

I am referring potential players for like years now, but I don't know if you guys can track that. Even if this litespeed webserver can track referrers and stuff, I think it would still be a good idea to use Google Analytics.

Knowing John's interest in technology I would actually be quite curious to know if he has a reason for not using Analytics or he just overlooked it.

Setup takes 5 minutes, interpretation of results can take as little as 20 minutes at a time, and the clues received on optimizing traffic can be huge.
Useful for referral program tracking (along with conversions) as well.

I am offering this as a professional service, but should you decide to use it, you can then provide me with a read-only account on analytics, and I can provide some simple optimization hints every now and then or at least some insight. Complimentary, of course :)

regards.

Analytics is slow and I hate going to sites that use it (a lot of them), as it usually stalls out my connection until my data is passed back to google. Sometimes only a second or so, but I find it irritating. We went to a tremendous effort to get the maximum performance out of our site, and the idea of then nerfing it by requiring a back-channel client connection to some machine I can't control.. is kind of unattractive to me.

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty cool, I've seen it. But, I get enough data just from my own logs and our various internal data correlations.

I might try turning it on at some future point, for a short period, and then turning it back off again. We'll see. It's not a huge priority right now.

Plus, tracking *actual* referrals, though the game, would go far beyond anything that Analytics or any other web-data-processing could do (much as our own internal statistics do, since they're correlated to actual game and billing data that we don't make public).

I've seen that behavior on several sites and in order to avoid it i placed the analytics code at the bottom of my pages. It does miss some hits i would guess, but it doesn't stall my pages, or at least not the content.
Anyway, thanks for the answer, I get your point and yes, it's a good reason, and a lot of free log analysis tools are very good as alternatives.