THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 18

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 18 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.

Digital PR Tips: Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From February

BuzzStream: 47 Expert Digital PR Tips (From 50 BuzzStream Newsletters)

Bottle: Syndicated Links: What is the SEO value of Content Syndication?

BuzzStream: 10 Tips for Building Relationships with Journalists in 2025

Distinctly: The PR strategy for events: securing press, influencers and links

editorial.link: How to Build Backlinks with Ahrefs

Ahrefs: SEO Is the Worst It’s Ever Been (And It’s Still Your Best Marketing Channel)

Search Engine Journal: Google’s Martin Splitt Warns Against Redirecting 404s To Homepage

Advanced Web Ranking: Google CTR Stats – Changes Report for Q4 2024

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Integrate AI into Your Digital PR Processes with Distinctly’s Matt Foster

The Digital PR Podcast: Is TikTok the New Search Engine? w/ Ray Saddiq

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

1️⃣ Learn when you do certain tasks better and aim to optimise your schedule around this. For example, some people's brains take a while to get going, and that means they're more creative in the afternoon. Whereas others are the opposite and are at their most productive in the mornings.

2️⃣ When you take time off, whether it be a day or a week, switch off from the job as much as possible. Stop looking for reactive opportunities, new links, client emails and industry updates. It’ll all still be there when you come back.

3️⃣ Don't get so obsessed with building links and driving rankings that you neglect the brand. Showing the impact of Digital PR campaigns on brand metrics will look far more impressive to your client/boss than DA metrics and link numbers on their own.

4️⃣ Make sure your assets in your pitches and on your landing page (tables, infographics, etc) are optimised for mobile. Journalists are likely to check out your story on mobile and readers are definitely viewing your landing page on mobile. Tables that are hard to take in on mobile is really frustrating UX.

5️⃣ Here's how to preview campaign pages as on mobile via desktop. On your campaign page, right click --> Inspect --> select the device you want to view as from the dropdown at the top of the page.

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 The Knight Frank 2025 Wealth Report

The Wealth Report is an annual report released by Knight Frank that is a massive deep dive into global finance and wealth data. The new 2025 issue of the report has just been released in the last week and covers a huge amount of data including global wealth by continent, some really interesting breakdowns of the world’s billionaires looking at their personal demographics and how they made their fortunes, which country has the most billionaires, as well as industry specific breakdowns.

As well as being a great data source for campaigns, the report is also a fab case study for how creating reports like this are amazing for establishing yourself as an industry leading thought leader, and earning a load of backlinks at the same time. The report has been released every year for over a decade and by using the same url each year, it now has over 7,600 backlinks from more than 1,700 referring domains!

2️⃣ Data on Excessive Alcohol Use

This dataset from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a great resource for stats on binge drinking in the US. The data covers the amount of men and women in the US that drink excessively, the percentage of adults in each State that binge drink, and the cost per person of excessive drinking.

Pair this dataset up with a previous one I’ve shared from World Population Review looking at alcohol consumption levels and driving fatalities involving alcohol by State, and you have the start of a good Index campaign or Report exploring alcohol misuse across America 😉.

3️⃣ YouGov Report - How Brits feel about generative AI in media

A lot of the time we focus on data sources from the angle of finding datasets that can be used to create bigger campaigns like Indexes for example. But audience insights can also be a great starting point for expert commentary campaigns, or just finding inspiration for topics people are talking about.

YouGov is one of my favourite resources for audience insights, and they’ve just released a new report on how Brits feels about Gen AI in the media. These stats, which mainly focus on Brits but also have some country comparisons, can be a great introduction to a topic to explain to a Journalist and their readers why you’re talking about it and why they should care, while also giving your experts something to respond to and give their comments more context.

4️⃣ Experiences of NHS healthcare services in England

This ONS dataset is updated on a monthly basis and provides a fascinating look at patient experiences and satisfaction of NHS healthcare services. The dataset covers off 53 different questions, such as how easy it was to make an appointment, how satisfied patients were with the service, and how many people are on a waiting list, all of which is broken down by age, gender, region, and more.

This is very similar to the GP Patient Survey site. I’m not 100% sure how often that site updates the on-site data though. I would say that site is more user friendly for exploring specific questions at specific practices/regions, but the ONS Excel datasets are better for bigger data analysis projects.

5️⃣ Zillow

If you’re looking to create any content around house prices in the US, Zillow is a great resource for easily finding property prices. What I really like about Zillow is that they have a great search function and their pages aren’t super hard to scrape data from, making it a great resource for data collection.

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 Best Time to Travel by Kayak

📊 181 RDs, 42 DR 50+

I love an interactive tool that serves a genuinely helpful purpose for a brand’s target audience, and this is one of the best examples of that which I can think of. Travel brand Kayak created a tool that asks you where you want to go on holiday, and in return gives you a ton of data to inform you of the best month to take your holiday in. The tool gives you lots of really helpful data on flight and accommodation costs throughout the year, and expected temperatures during each month of the year.

I imagine this was a very big project to complete, both in terms of time and budget, but when big ideas come off their ceiling is so much higher than safer lower budget tactics. And the value for a campaign like this goes far beyond just earning backlinks. For a site that lets you compare flight deals, a tool like this is so on brand and I’ve no doubt due to it’s popularity has had a genuine impact on traffic and brand perceptions for Kayak.

2️⃣ When It Rains, We Pour by Greene King

📊 130 RDs, 106 DR 50+

This is another great example of a Digital PR campaign that earned huge coverage numbers with an idea that is super on brand. Last March, UK pub chain Greene King launched a campaign where they gave away free pints if it started raining at one of their pubs in Deansgate. It brings together so many different elements that are quintessentially British - free pints, the weather, raining in Manchester. Oh and just to add to it they also got Peter Crouch involved in the promotion of it too.

For any Traditional PR teams looking for how they can add more SEO value to their campaigns, this is a great example of a stunt activation that actually had an on-site landing page, resulting in the majority of the coverage also including a backlink. The page has been redirected to the homepage now which I personally would try and avoid doing with old campaigns where possible, and is possibly a good example of what Google’s Martin Splitt is talking about here.

Although 130 referring domains sounds incredible from an SEO pov, it is worth mentioning that the majority of them come from a large Newsquest syndication. But I think this is a great case study of a campaign where syndicated content is super valuable. Although they’ll likely only get value from one of the links, the story being syndicated across over a hundred different regional news sites creates a huge audience that will see the story, which has a huge impact when the story is this memorable and very likely had a strong positive impression on brand metrics.

3️⃣ Buying Swimwear… Think Safety! by Alive Solutions

📊 76 RDs, 59 DR 50+

Sometimes you see a piece of content and it really sticks with you, and that’s the case with me and this campaign by Alive Solutions. The aquatic safety services brand tested how visible different colour swimsuits were while underwater, revealing that certain colours can become barely visible. Which is a pretty scary thought, and something that I had never really considered before seeing this. So in terms of emotions, you’ve not only hit on the sense of intrigue and new information, but also the fear emotion, which is one of the most powerful to hit on when creating content.

As with the previous two campaigns in this week’s issue, this is also just such an on brand campaign that hits all of the E-E-A-T elements you want to target (well maybe less so experience as the landing page isn’t the best). I also love that they’ve found a content format that works well and have gone back to it with different examples, such as how they look underwater in lakes, and how different patterns affect visibility.

4️⃣ How Safe Is Your Food? by Essential Living

📊 26 RDs, 22 DR 50+

Speaking of campaigns that find success by hitting on the emotion of fear, this campaign by Essential Living looking at hygiene ratings and poisoning reports for different supermarkets and restaurants is another great example of emotion based storytelling driving PR success.

The campaign ranked supermarkets by the number of poisoning reports (I bet Tesco’s team were chuffed with this one), the takeaway brands with the highest and lowest percentage of five star hygiene ratings, the worst dishes for food poisoning reports (I loved this creative angle), and the UK cities with the worst restaurant hygiene ratings. Lots of great angles that can all work as a standalone story, and all from readily available datasets sourced online.

5️⃣ Hacking Wins by Surfshark

📊 56 RDs, 21 DR 50+

This final campaign by Surfshark (who have done so many clever Tech campaigns over the years) is a really good use of data-led insights to create an interesting story with unique insights. To allow them to find which online games have the most cheaters, they analysed the number of views for related YouTube videos and ranked them by which had the most views. I really liked this as a different approach to looking at search volume data for insights on how people use the internet.

They did also use search data to rank which countries were most often looking for ways to cheat at the most popular games. I absolutely love the infographics for this campaign too. Just a really well done data-led piece.

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!

Position: Digital PR Specialist at Blue Array (Agency)

Location: Remote (UK)

Remote/Office Split: Fully remote with access to co-working

Salary: £32,000 - £36,000 PA, depending on experience

How to Apply: https://bluearray.bamboohr.com/careers/108

And that’s a wrap for Issue 18. Same time again next week ✌️

Found this useful? You can sign up to receive The Digital PR Observer Newsletter in your inbox each week for free by clicking the button below.

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 🙂