THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 23

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 23 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.

Digital PR Tips: Why you need to be building the personal brand of your PR experts to pass a Journalist’s vetting process

BuzzStream: Link Building Trends Report (2025)

Digitaloft: How to Use FOI Requests as a Digital PR Campaign Data Source

The PR Insider: How to Demonstrate Your Value as a Digital PR in 2025

Aira: Beyond the Link: Crafting Digital PR That's Both Link-worthy and Helpful

NOVOS: How to Earn Coverage with Expert Commentary

withFrontier: The Evolution of Digital PR: Key Skills for 2025 and Beyond

Propellernet: This Quarter in Links

Backlinko: 10 Ways to Create Helpful Content + Examples and Checklist

PRmoment: Hoodwinked by AI: the PR impact of fake ‘expert’ commentators

PR Newswire: 6 Tips for PR Pros to Build (and Maintain) Relationships with Journalists and Influencers

GSQi: When Links Go Wrong: Why News And Media Publishers Need To Embrace Earned Links And Ditch Nofollow

Press Gazette: Publishers delete and amend stories based on dubious experts

Press Gazette: UK ‘at risk of evolving into propaganda regime’ with unenforced FOI rules and official secrecy

Cision: Cision Announces Sale of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to Featured.com

SEOFOMO: brightonSEO April 2025 Slides

Search Engine Roundtable: Google AI Overviews Link To More Search Results

Search Engine Land: Google quality raters now assess whether content is AI-generated

Search Engine Journal: Google Files New Patent On Personal History-Based Search

BuzzStream Podcast: Pitching Journalists with Freelance Journalist, Rosie Taylor

Digital PR Explained Podcast: How to Fix “Boring” Stats in Your PR Pitch

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

1️⃣ When you start working with a new client that has an expert they're looking to get quoted in the media, create an intro pitch detailing who they are and what topics they're an expert on. This allows you to introduce them to key Journalists and gives them a record of who your expert is. Make sure you optimise this pitch to include relevant keywords so that if a Journo searches their inbox for a certain type of expert then your expert comes up in those results so they can contact you about how they can help.

2️⃣ Struggling to build a media list for a very niche industry? Find one of the sites that is relevant and look at which other accounts they follow on Twitter. You'll find a lot of similar publications to that one in there that you can then research to add to your media list.

3️⃣ News publications aren't the only platform that you can use to PR the brands you're working with while also building links to their website. Don't forget about marketing tactics such as podcasts, speaking events, and brand collaborations, that you can use to promote the brand and earn backlinks from.

4️⃣ E-A-T applies not only to domains but also to authors. If your campaign/blog pages don't have an author, consider adding one. If it's someone that Google can tell is an expert on the topic of the post this can have a positive impact on its ranking potential.

5️⃣ Syndicated coverage likely isn't adding any extra value to your SEO outside of the original link that they canonical to. Don't focus on that, focus on all the amazing PR coverage, brand mentions and referral traffic you're sending to your site.

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 US Highway Statistics by State

This site is such a great resource if you have a motor client in the US. The US Department of Transportation share all sorts of stats on this page about highways which are broken down by State and have a historical archive of data dating from 2015, to the most recent data as of 2022. Data includes things such as the number of vehicle miles traveled, the length of highways in each State, fuel consumption, licensed drivers and registered vehicles. All of these stats are broken down by each State making for lots of potential ideas for map campaigns.

2️⃣ 2024-25 FA Registered Football Agent Fees and Transactions

This week the English Football Association released their annual report on Football agent fees. The report lists the total amount paid to agents for every club and every league in the English Football pyramid, along with details of every transaction involving football agents detailed by each club and each player (but sadly not with fees specific to each player). The page doesn’t list previous years’ data but it’s out there if you google FA agent fees report followed by the year you want to find. This could be a good report for comparing vs previous years, or plotting against transfer fees for each club.

3️⃣ ONS: Sources of support and perceptions of safety among young people in England and Wales

This ONS dataset is a tad depressing if I’m being totally honest, but does have some very interesting data. The survey covering England and Wales analyses the levels of support young people aged 16-29 have, and how safe they feel. It covers questions such as if they feel they have an adult they can trust (nearly 1 in 10 don’t), how likely they think it is that they will be attacked by someone (9% said likely or very likely with 7% fearing being attacked by someone with a weapon), and steps young adults have taken out of fear of gangs and people carrying weapons (21% of females avoid travelling alone, and 18% avoid going out at certain times of the day). Surveys like this can be a great starting point for PR activations and cause marketing campaigns.

4️⃣ Luminate 2024 Music Industry Report

This report from Luminate is a great deep dive into the music industry looking at the most popular artists and songs of last year, how we consume music, and a look at music super fans. The report contains a ton of data including stats on digital vs physical consumption, the fastest growing genres by US metro level, the top songwriters in the world, how much super fans spend on their favourite artists and how they engage with them, the top music documentaries of 2024, which gen spend the most on live events, the most sold vinyl albums in the US, and a whole lot more. A really fascinating report for any music fans.

5️⃣ Earthquake List

This site has all the data you need if you want to research earthquakes, which could be a good metric for index campaigns ranking the safest places to live as one example. There’s a number of reports including a list of the latest earthquakes, the strongest earthquakes of the last decade and of all time, the countries with the most earthquakes each year dating back to 2015, and the cities that have the most earthquakes.

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 Adult Toy Easter Eggs by Ricky

📊 31 RDs, 24 DR 50+

With this week being Easter week, I wanted to share one of my favourite Easter themed campaigns from within the Digital PR space. Easter and sex toys probably isn’t the most obvious connection for a PR story, but adult sex toys brand Ricky managed to pull it off with a great bit of Product PR. Ricky put their own cheeky twist on the traditional easter egg and sold chocolate eggs with sex toys inside. Some of the best examples of Product PR are ideas that you look at and think “oh that’s so simple”. But the reality is a lot of hard work and creative thinking goes into generating that “simple” idea and execution.

24 referring domains DR 50+ is a big success and further proof that brands like this can absolutely get links on top news publications like Metro, The Sun, and Manchester Evening News without resorting to off brand topics and campaigns that lack relevancy. It’s also worth noting that when you’re looking at the number of links Product PR campaigns have achieved to the product page in backlink tools like Ahrefs, the real number is often likely quite a bit higher once you include affiliate links that these tools won’t include. That’s because they aren’t a direct backlink to the landing page you’re analysing as they (usually) redirect through the affiliate domain first.

This campaign is also a great example of how just because an idea has been done in previous years, doesn’t mean you can’t put your own spin on a very similar idea. In 2015, Durex released the Durex Easter X which was an Easter Egg with adult Durex products inside them. That campaign was a big success and so was this one, so don’t be afraid to use successful campaigns from yesteryear, as long as you’re putting your own relevant spin on the idea and not blatantly copying a concept.

2️⃣ The Happiness of Pet Owners by Tracking Happiness

📊 22 RDs, 13 DR 50+

This survey campaign by Tracking Happiness is a really good example of how surveys can be used to provide valuable audience insights while also forming a strong PR story capable of earning backlinks. For the survey, mental health brand Tracking Happiness surveyed 12,167 respondents from around the world asking them if they owned a pet and how happy they’ve been in the last year.

One of the risks of doing survey campaigns is that you can sink a lot of money into survey responses with the fear of needing a certain outcome from the results in order for your campaign to work from a PR point of view. Giving that Tracking Happiness is a brand all about ways to boost positivity and happiness, I imagine they were very much conducting this survey in the hope that the results revealed that people with pets are happier than those without pets. Which thankfully for them it did! It’s always good however to plan your surveys in a way that gives you strong potential headlines regardless of the direction the responses take, otherwise you could be left with the bleak reality of no interesting data to use and a large invoice to pay.

I always love to see survey’s with a big sample size like this one has - 12,167 total respondents, 9,663 of which were pet owners. In reality, the sample size probably doesn’t need to be that high, but the data nerd in me loves to see it. The advantage of having a larger sample size is that when you break your responses down by certain demos or responses, you still maintain a reliable sample size.

For example, this campaign also ranked which pet owners are happiest by how many pets they own and what type of pets. By having a total survey size of 1,000, once you start filtering that down by just horse owners for example, your sample size for that level of analysis can sometimes become extremely small, and not really a sample size we should be using for any sort of analysis.

3️⃣ Pet Plaques by TrustedHousesitters

📊 29 RDs

If there’s one thing that I’d love to see more of from PR campaigns produced within the Digital PR space, it’s campaigns that have a really strong storytelling element to them that hits you right in the feels. Here, TrustedHousesitters put their own spin on the traditional concept of plaques and created plaques for inspirational pets.

This campaign by TrustedHousesitters is a fab example of combining the best of PR and SEO together - the brand focused storytelling of Traditional PR with the added SEO input to help the piece earn backlinks and drive page traffic. The landing page is a lovely read through of the stories of each pet and their owners too.

4️⃣ Matching Owner & Dog Jumpers by Missguided

Another example here of a clever bit of Product PR, this time from the fashion industry. Back in 2019, Missguided launched matching dog jumpers so that dog owners could sync their outfits up with their fluffy friends. It’s another case of something that looks super simple when you see it, but is the end product of years and years of taking in similar PR campaigns and training the creative side of your brain to come up with ideas like this.

The matching dog jumpers were covered across basically all of the top UK news publications, although all of the links now seem to go to 404 pages - oops! One of the greatest benefits of Product PR that I think doesn’t get mentioned often enough is the power of these type of campaigns in driving sales directly from your PR coverage. Don’t get so caught up in KPI metrics like number of links, DR of publications, and so on, that you forget to focus on the metrics those KPI metrics are supposed to be indicators of - commercial metrics such as website traffic and sales.

5️⃣ Happiest States in America by WalletHub

📊 1,235 RDs, 451 DR 50+

WalletHub is undeniably in the pinnacle of sites to research and analyse that are creating best in class link building assets, especially when it comes to index campaigns. This is another example of a WalletHub index campaign that has earned links from well over 1,000 referring domains. This one looks at the happiest states in America and ranks them against three main categories - emotional and physical wellbeing, work environment, and community environment.

What I love about a lot of these WalletHub studies is that they go into such great detail with the metrics they analyse for creating each ranking. In my opinion, 4-7 categories is a good number of ranking factors to have for an index campaign. It’s enough for one to not be too influential or better analysed on it’s own, but also not too many that it becomes confusing for the reader, or becomes data almost for the sake of data. This index has 30 different metrics as part of the analysis. Which is too many in most cases tbf. But where they’ve been smart is they’ve categorised those 30 metrics into three categories to help keep things simple for the reader, while still having that greater level of analysis and reliability that they’re obviously looking for with this study.

Since many WalletHub campaigns use a lot of different data sources as part of their rankings, they are also a great source of inspiration for finding new data sources that you can use for your own campaigns. Each campaign has a methodology section at the end that you can quickly jump to in order to find where they’ve obtained the data for each metric from, which can be a great way of finding new data sources you maybe didn’t know existed!

And that’s a wrap for Issue 23. 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 🙂