THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 24

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 24 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

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.

BuzzStream: How Effective is Spray and Pray in PR? (We Analyzed 31M Emails To Find Out)

Prowly: What is Reactive PR and How Does it Compare to Proactive PR?

Cision: 2025 Comms Report

Cision: 7 Expert Tips for Using Generative AI in PR

Distinctly: 5 top insights for landing PR coverage in Spain and Latin America

US Search Awards: Decoding Digital PR in the US: What It Takes to Earn Links and Media Coverage in 2025

Digitaloft: How we got our digital PR campaign for Blackcircles.com spoken about in Parliament

Samantha Levene on LinkedIn: What emotions are REALLY driving top performing campaigns?

Ahrefs: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%

The Digital PR Podcast: Harnessing AI in Digital PR w/ Alex Cassidy

BuzzStream Podcast: How Preply Earned 12K Links and 3M Visitors with Digital PR w/ Daniele Saccardi

BuzzStream Podcast: Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is Back! (We Talked to the New Owner)

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

1️⃣ Want a number to feel bigger? Use a bigger timeframe. For example, 30 mins a day sounds small. 182 hours a year sounds big.

2️⃣ "Inspect Canonical" is a great Chrome extension that will tell if you the page has a canonical tag that points to another url, or if it will be viewed by Google as a unique piece of content. If your coverage url has a canonical url to a different page that likely means it's syndicated content. When you click on the extension it will take you to the canonical url so you can see which site the original piece of content is on.

3️⃣ Audits that just export data and put them into slides are useless. The whole point of an audit is that you, as the expert, take that data, analyse it, and then provide actionable action points that make sense of the data for key stakeholders to be able to understand.

4️⃣ If you’re pitching expert comments and your first pitch hasn’t landed, use your follow up email as an opportunity to not only repitch your current story, but also give the Journo more background on the topics your spokesperson can also provide other expert comments around. Their quotes may not be right for that Journalist at that very moment in time, but they may have a need for quotes from them for a different story they are working on.

5️⃣ Don’t ask Journalists to change a nofollow link to a follow link. The vast majority of the time they’re not in control of it and couldn’t do it even if they wanted to.

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 Corruption Perceptions Index

The Corruption Perceptions Index is essentially an Index campaign that Transparency International publishes each year. The index is made up of 13 different data sources to measure the perceived levels of corruption in 180 countries. It’s a great example of how a reliable and trusted data source doesn’t always have to be made up of a primary research. It also shows how data sources can also be great link building assets, as evidenced by this report having nearly 4,000 referring domains. The data from the report is easy to download and has some great comparison data points to spotlight which countries are improving and declining. A great dataset to use for your own index campaigns.

2️⃣ Sources of Foreign Direct Investment into the US

This tool by the International Trade Association allows you to see which countries are providing the most foreign direct investment into the US. Using the interactive tool you can get data on the number of US workers employed by US affiliates of foreign owned firms, foreign workers employed by foreign affiliates of US owned companies, which countries are buying the most stock in US companies, and which countries’ companies Americans are buying stock in. All of which are broken down by country with historical data dating back decades. Some great insights you could gather from this tool for a finance or business brand for example.

3️⃣ Road lengths in Great Britain

This dataset from the UK Department for Transport detailing the lengths of roads and the different types in Great Britain isn’t necessarily all that interesting by itself. However, it can be a great data point to use for motoring campaigns to weight results by. For example, rather than looking at the number of traffic incidents in major cities weighted by the population of the city, you could instead weight them by the length of road in each city to find the most dangerous roads per mile.

4️⃣ The 2025 AI Index Report

AI is obviously a very hot topic that a lot of brands are looking to produce content around. Therefore, this recently released AI Index Report by Stanford University could be an interesting read and source of either data points or brainstorm inspo. The report is pretty massive at 456 pages so includes a lot of data, but from a quick skim through it some of the more interesting data points include the countries with the most AI patents granted, how much top AI models cost to train, stereotypes in AI responses, and analysis of AI job postings such as the countries investing the most in AI jobs and the most in demand skills for AI positions.

5️⃣ International Monetary Fund: World Economic Outlook Report - April 2025

Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund released the latest edition of their World Economic Outlook Report. The report is an amazing resource for financial data on countries with both current data and projected forecasts up to 2030 on a wide range of topics such as a countries current GDP and projected GDP growth, inflation rates, volume of imports and exports, unemployment rates, and government finance statistics. On the database page you can create your own reports for specific countries and/or data points which helps to make exporting the data you need pretty easy.

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 Happy Planet Index

📊 3,182 RDs, 956 DR 50+

The Happy Planet Index is a really cool project that ranks countries by a combination of how happy both their people and their environment is. The index is “a measure of sustainable wellbeing, evaluating countries by how efficiently they deliver long, happy lives for their residents using our limited environmental resources”. It’s not the most in depth index you’ll ever see, but as you can see from the amount of referring domains the site has built up over the years, it’s a hugely popular project.

Obviously not every PR campaign can build out an entire microsite, but for me the biggest learnings from this project are the presentation of the data and the motivation behind it. I love the colour balances of the data and the way all of the content has been formatted to give off a happy vibe is really clever and impressive to pull off. Each country also has it’s own page detailing the results of the index with every data point ranked out of the 147 countries that the project analyses, and bespoke charts showing performance of individual stats such as life expectancy and carbon footprints over the years.

It’s also a great example of how data led indexes like this can be used to promote positive brand messages about making a positive change towards topics the brand is passionate about. Indexes are great for providing comparison points if you repeat the process each year, which also provide valuable opportunities to spotlight places that are improving or getting worse, which brands can then use the power of PR and positive cause marketing to pressure other brands/cities/celebs/etc into making positive changes for the society, the environment, and so on.

2️⃣ Happiest Cities in America by WalletHub

📊 1,233 RDs, 408 DR 50+

In last week’s issue, I shared WalletHub’s campaign on the Happiest States in America which had earned over 4,000 backlinks from over 1,200 referring domains. Well, WalletHub also produced another campaign that is very similar, ranking the happiest cities rather than the happiest states this time. I’m a big advocate of finding content formats that work well and then maximising the outputs and results you can generate from one idea or format. This is a great example of that via WalletHub who have created two campaigns, both earning over 1,000 referring domains, from the same concept of an idea.

I initially assumed that the methodology would be near enough exactly the same but ranking cities rather than states. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that while the format of three main categories with lots of individual metrics for ranking points in each category was consistent, the individual data points actually varied quite a bit.

Bonus Tip: As well as being a great source of new data sources you can use for your own campaigns, WalletHub campaigns are also a great resource for expanding out your media lists by analysing their backlink profile to find news sites that are interested in covering similar index type campaigns.

3️⃣ How Hard Is My Water? by Aqua Cure

📊 122 RDs, 29 DR 50+

This campaign by Aqua Cure is a great example of how productive data-led content that answers popular search queries can be as link building assets. Searches with the intent of discovering the water hardness in your area have a lot of search interest split over a large range of keywords. While individual keywords such as “water hardness by postcode”, “water hardness in my area”, and “hard water areas uk” with monthly search volumes of 1,500, 1,200, and 900 respectively aren’t massive, once you combine the hundred odd variations of them all together, you start earning a lot of search visibility if you can create a page capable of ranking at the top of page 1.

To do so, Aqua Cure created a map visualising the water hardness across the UK, while also adding in a tool that lets the user input their postcode to find results specific to their location. The page gives the user the answer to the query they’re searching for, while also providing great UX to make finding the most relevant answer for them personally as easy as possible. As a result of incorporating keyword research as a key element of the campaign production, Aqua Cure’s page now ranks for over 2,600 keywords driving nearly 5,000 monthly organic sessions to their site.

What I love about campaigns that provide valuable and relevant answers to user search queries, is that more than page can achieve strong results. On page 1 for “hard water map uk” you’ve also got very similar maps by Kinetico and by Bristan. Both of their pages also get 400+ organic sessions each month, and backlinks from 30+ referring domains. This goes to show that even being 2nd or 3rd best can still produce great results, and with evergreen topics there’s always the potential to keep improving on your existing results.

4️⃣ Grocery Price Index by Trolley.co.uk

📊 55 RDs, 22 DR 50+

I love data led projects that can be effective link building assets but also provide a genuinely useful resource for their target audience. This is a great example of that from Trolley.co.uk, a site that allows you to compare supermarket prices of popular groceries. Their Grocery Price Index tracks the average sale price of different groceries across the major UK supermarkets to reveal which are increasing by the highest percentage YoY.

What I really like about how the tool is put together, is how you can click into any individual grocery chart for more detailed analysis on things like how often the price changes, comparison of prices and increases across different supermarkets, and how prices vary for different brands. A really well put together tool that stays up to date with live data. As well as being a cool campaign, this could also be a useful data source for your own campaign.

5️⃣ Gridlocked Cities by Geotab

📊 14 RDs, 12 DR 50+

This campaign by fleet vehicle management company Geotab is a very very cool use of internal data to reveal how traffic congestion changes throughout the day in major US cities. The data was sourced from from 7.7 million reports collected from their own Geotab GO devices over a one year period. I really love that as one of the more creative uses I’ve seen of sourcing internal data to tell a creative data-led story.

The campaign page is really nice too and the interactive elements that allow you to click into each of the 20 cities analysed to see how much the average vehicle speed drops by the hour, alongside the average speed in mph, is great UX and really interesting data to browse through.

That said, there’s a lot of opportunities for more analysis that could have also been included on the campaign pages, for example, tables ranking the cities by the worst speed drop during peak traffic times, and which cities have the fastest average speed during each hour of the day. The campaign was done way back in 2018 so it’s definitely a format that could be revisited by a brand able to put their own unique spin on the idea.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 24. 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

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 🙂