THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 14

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 14 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.

If you missed last week’s issue, or any others, you can always catch previous issues of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter here.

Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:

• The latest Digital PR news and resources

• 5 quick fire tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

• 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

• 5 successful campaigns from the archives

• The latest Digital PR jobs

If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Press Gazette: Reach reporters warned over unauthorised linking to commercial sites

HoldTheFrontPage: Reach to launch new standalone brands aimed at ‘superfans’

PressGazette: Most generative AI responses based on news content contain inaccuracies

PA Media: How to make your stats usable to journalists

NOVOS: Digital PR Ideation Techniques to Test in 2025

NOVOS: How to Track Your Press Coverage: a Step-by-Step Guide for eCommerce Brands

Allure: This Therapist Is Not Who She Seems to Be (a great read on the issue with fake AI experts)

Ahrefs: How Do AI Content Detectors Work? Answers From a Data Scientist

Bring Digital: 4 Reasons Not to Sleep On Nofollow Links in Your Digital PR Strategy

PRmoment: PR should be tracking more than reach - here are the metrics that matter

The HOTH: Top 10 Digital PR Strategies to Drive Backlinks and Organic Traffic

Sam Walker on LinkedIn: Learnings from a FOI campaign

Kirsty Hulse on LinkedIn: Work things we forget are normal

Aliyah Loughan on LinkedIn: Lots of great tips in the comments on ideation processes

The Digital PR Podcast: The Importance of Brand Building w/ Stephen Kenwright

Linking Out Loud Podcast: How to Critique Your Campaign Ideas (and What to Do When They Don’t Land) w/ Hannah Smith

Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:

1️⃣ Not every campaign needs to build 10+ links to be a success. If you run a small campaign that is very niche and super relevant to a small group of 8-10 sites, and you build links on 2 or 3 of them, that's an awesome conversion rate and a huge success!

2️⃣ Don't bury the lead in your emails. Journalists will decide within seconds whether to consider your pitch. Get to the juicy part straight away, ideally in your subject line. A great email with a generic subject line is an unread email.

3️⃣ If you're struggling to find a Journo's email, try running a reverse image search on their profile picture. It will show other profile pages they have which may have their email listed on (but be careful not to pitch to their personal email which likely won't be appreciated).

4️⃣ Internal data is some of the best sources of data that you can use. Why? Only you have them. They can be golden for creating stories about trends in site searches and product sales.

5️⃣ If you've included images in your press pack specific to your campaign, run a Google Image search for those images. You might possibly pick up some extra coverage you may have missed. Really good way of tracking unlinked coverage but also uncredited coverage.

Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.

1️⃣ School and College Performance in England

This tool shows you all publicly available data about any school or college in England, and is a fantastic starting point for brainstorms if you have any brands that want to target parents with their content. The tool is super easy to use, letting you look up data on Ofsted reports, absence rates, test results, school workforce and spending, gender split, and more, for a specific school, or a list of schools within a certain location or radius from a postcode. Also a really useful real life tool for any parents.

2️⃣ Government Finance Statistics by Country

One of many fascinating datasets from International Monetary Fund. This one lists the expenditure on different sectors for each country, for example, how much is spent on general public services, health, protection, defense, environment protection, and more. There’s a lot of data here, and a lot of uses for it. Exporting data from IMF datasets is made pretty simple, and there’s even an API option too.

3️⃣ UK Grantmaking Report

The UK Grantmaking Report is a very interesting report to read through that covers every aspect of the UK grant funding industry. On top of all that, they’ve very handily made all of their data and research easy to download in a lovely Excel file.

4️⃣ Gold Reserves by Country

This one is quite niche but also actually very interesting. The World Gold Council keeps data on how much gold reserves each country owns, and this page nicely breaks that data down. You can also easily create comparison points to previous time periods using the tool too. The same url gets updated each month. Could be an interesting data point for international index campaigns.

5️⃣ Open Subtitles

I’ve shared a few Kaggle datasets in this section that have long archives of exported text from Reddits or TV Show scripts, that I think can unlock a ton of potential creative language analysis ideas. Open Subtitles is another great resource to download scripts as text files, helping you to analyse the language on different Movies and TV Shows.

In this next section, I take a look at five campaigns from my archive of campaign inspo, with some quick fire analysis of what I liked about them and what made them work. Referring Domains (RDs) figures are taken from ahrefs.

1️⃣ The Countries that Pay the Most and Least for LEGO by The ToyZone

📊 30 RDs DR 50+

This is such a cool piece by TheToyZone comparing the cost of different LEGO sets around the world. It’s super on brand and hits on a number of different emotional responses. The first being the emotional feels and nostalgia for anything LEGO related, and the second being the curiosity factor.

I never would have thought that LEGO would have such large disparities in costs around the world, and it’s those “oh I didn’t know that” responses that make for a great campaign, and help turn data into a story. The graphics are amazing and I love that they’ve compared the costs of different types of sets such as Marvel, Disney, and Harry Potter too.

A lot of the time I think map campaigns like this can be wasted resource if you’re not going to use the other countries as part of your outreach efforts. If you’re only going to outreach in your home market, then you’re much better off breaking the data down by city/state/etc rather than by country (obviously not possible for every idea, including this one). But from looking at the linking sites to this piece, there’s a huge variety of different countries covering the story.

2️⃣ The best and worst U.S. cities for your skin by HouseFresh

📊 4 RDs DR 50+

This campaign by HouseFresh on the best cities for your skin in America is a really well researched piece with some stunning graphics, but what I really like about it is how it stays true to its core product of air purifiers, while also managing to tap into a topic with a wider audience, without losing that boundary of relevance to the brand.

The campaign earned 21 RDs in total, 4 DR 50+. Which highlights another key limitation of just relying on DR/DA for evaluating the quality of a website. Lots of the linking news publications below DR 50 are regional radio stations in the US, which have big audiences and are obviously super relevant sites to get coverage on. But a lot of them aren’t your traditionally high DR websites like other news sites. There’s a lot of different reasons for why, but they’re a great example of why I always recommend trusting your gut and your eyes when it comes to evaluating the quality of a publication, rather than a seriously overrated DA/DR metric.

3️⃣ The Price of Pet Ownership by Savoo

📊 29 RDs DR 50+

My favourite piece of advice for coming up with relevant campaign ideas is to find problem points for your target audience, and then create content that helps them find solutions to the problems they’re facing. This campaign by Savoo does just that, with a really extensive data-led research piece on the lifetime cost of owning a pet.

I also love how they’ve broken the data down by different breeds of cats and dogs to allow them to compare the cheapest and most expensive breeds to own. They’ve also included data at the end on the most pet friendly cities in the UK and in Europe, which is great, but feels like something that should be fleshed out as its own campaign rather than just added on to the end of this piece. I do wish there was more detail on the methodology and data sources used too.

4️⃣ The Aftermath of a YouTube Apology by The Pudding

📊 6 RDs DR 50+

It’s kinda crazy that I’ve made it to Issue 14 without including a piece by The Pudding here. The Pudding, for those not yet aware, is one of the best sites on the internet for incredible breakdowns of data-led insights with stunning data vis and interactive landing pages.

This piece from 2020 is a really cool breakdown of apology videos by YouTube stars. The analysis breaks down how their apology videos affected their subscriber rates, as well as the different constructions of the videos based on the number of cuts, number of apologies per minute, and more.

5️⃣ Flags of Inequality

📊 8 RDs DR 50+

I love when content pieces find creative ways to utilise data vis to showcase data trends and analysis. This page is a beautiful illustrative deep dive into the most LGBTQ+ friendly countries, which uses the six colours of the rainbow flag to rank the six metrics used. This is then used to illustrate the best and worst ranking countries based on the size of their rainbow flag. I also love how you can compare the rankings for previous years dating back to 2015, and the fact that they keep the page updated each year.

8 RDs DR 50+ sounds great, however it’s a good example of how you should always look at the actual sites linking to a page rather than just relying on the figures alone. Of the 8 sites, 5 of them are generic SEO directory sites that have a high DR but have literally no SEO value at all.

In this section, you’ll find some of the latest Digital PR roles being advertised. If you’re currently hiring for a Digital PR role and want the position advertising here, you can add it using this form.

Likewise, if you’re looking for a new Digital PR role and are happy to have that advertised, drop me an email and I’m happy to give you a “looking for work” plug in this section too!

Looking for work 💡

“Due to redundancy, Becca Tee is on the lookout for a new digital PR or copywriting role (senior/manager/lead level). She is a former journalist with more than 9 years of experience in PR, and has worked with both B2B and B2C clients.”

Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/becca-t-97800986/

Position: Senior Digital PR Executive (DE or IT) at Reboot (Agency)

Location: Remote (UK)

Remote/Office Split: Fully remote - we work a 4 day week (Fridays off)

Salary: £28,000

How to Apply: Email your cover letter and CV to HR@rebootonline.com addressed to Zoe Blogg

Position: Senior PR Executive at FATJOE (Agency)

Location: UK

Remote/Office Split: Remote

Salary: £28,000 - £32,000

How to Apply: https://fatjoewho.typeform.com/SrPRExec2025

And that’s a wrap for Issue 14. Same time again next week ✌️

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Each week in the newsletter, you’ll get:

• The latest Digital PR news and resources

• 5 tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

• 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

• 5 successful campaigns that we liked

• The latest Digital PR jobs

If you’ve missed any previous editions of the newsletter, you can go through the archive of issues on the Digital PR Tips website.

Have any feedback for the newsletter? Anything you liked, disliked, or want to see more of? Send an email to matt@digitalprtips.com and let me know 🙂