Pasta Hut vs. Pizza Hut

Ed: Advertising impact without social media leverage. Imagine the results with planned social leverage.

Pasta Hut vs. Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut made the headlines earlier in the week after rebranding itself as Pasta Hut in the UK. If the move really is just a clever bit of PR, as some people suspect, then it seems to have worked. In addition to significant media coverage, the company has also benefitted online: as the chart below illustrates, yesterday the Pasta Hut website received twice as many UK Internet visits as the Pizza Hut UK homepage. In fact, yesterday was a record day for the restaurant chain online.

Of the people who did visit the Pizza Hut site yesterday, 37.4% went to Pasta Hut afterwards. Overall 6.7% of Pasta Hut’s traffic came from the Pizza Hut homepage. The site’s clickstream also reveals a surprise: as the table below illustrates, 43.9% of traffic to pastahut.co.uk came fromMSN UK, more than 3 times the amount that it received from Google UK. Presumably the company either ran advertising or a paid search campaign on the Microsoft portal / search engine.