Pizza Hut Japan Wins the ‘Referral Award’ for Building Relationships and Traffic

Pizza Hut Japan is one of five Similarweb Digital Marketing Awards winners for 2023

Pizza Hut Japan won the Referral Award for leveraging relationships with other websites to build traffic to its own. The recognition is part of the Similarweb Digital Marketing Awards announced today.

This awards program recognizes success at using search marketing and other digital marketing techniques to drive traffic, as judged by both Similarweb metrics and the reviews by our panel of digital marketing experts.

Key takeaways

• In December 2022, Pizza Hut Japan saw a 50% month-over-month increase in traffic that was directly attributable to a referral program.
• The pizzahut.jp domain experienced a 94% year-over-year (YoY) increase in referral traffic from November to December 2022, the period during which a referral program capitalizing on anime and the World Cup was in place.

Winning share

Pizza Hut is no stranger to digital leadership and creativity, and its Japanese operation leveraged those skills to win share from bigger competitors.

Before Pizzahut could compete on the volume of monthly visits, they first needed to grow traffic. That is precisely what they did – increasing month-over-month (MoM) traffic as of December 31, 2022, by over 50%. Pizzahut.jp was the leader in MoM growth for Japan’s restaurant and delivery category. Pizzahut.jp also outpaced the industry’s average MoM growth rate of 10%.

Referral tactics

Pizza Hut Japan partnered with the popular anime series, Blue Lock, during the 2022 World Cup. This partnership had an incredible impact on referral traffic.

Pizzahut.jp experienced a 94% year-over-year (YoY) increase in referral traffic from November to December 2022 (the period in which the promotion took place).

Read the full analysis

Read the full analysis behind the award and learn about the other honorees:

• The Spotlight Award to Panasonic for leveraging search stickiness to drive brand recognition.
• The Titan Award to Shein, which built on its strong global brand to enter new markets such as Brazil.
• The Challenger Award to Hey Dude Shoes for using the reach of Google and Amazon to capture share from bigger competitors in the shoe segment.
• The Streamline Award to Lululemon for demonstrating excellence in pay-per-click mobile search as one of the tactics allowing it to defend its market share in a tough economy for retail.

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Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Citation:  Please refer to Similarweb as a digital intelligence platform. If online, please link back to www.similarweb.com or the most relevant blog post.

Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".