THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 26

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 26 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: Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From April

Daisy Hunt on Medium: Better together: Why PR and link-building shouldn’t live in silos

Prosperity Media: An introduction to Digital PR in Australia

NOVOS: A Guide to Backlink Metrics: Which Should You Be Using and Why?

BuzzStream: Do You Need Unsubscribe Links in Email Outreach (And Do They Impact Outreach)?

The Drum: We’re all becoming more savvy to AI-washing

PRmoment: Are fake AI experts improving media relations?

Adobe: Pinterest is emerging as a go-to search engine

David White on LinkedIn: Reddit = Untapped Goldmine

George Cannon on LinkedIn: How to use interviews for coverage with iGaming clients

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Pitch Local U.S. News Sites for Better Links w/ Collin Czarnecki

The Digital PR Podcast: How To Future-Proof Your PR Reporting w/ Stella Bayles

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

1️⃣ When you put your data in an infographic, always try and include the data in a table too. This makes it easier for Google to use the data for a featured snippet which can boost you up to the top of the SERP. You could also use read more tags which won't stop the data being seen by Google and can make the page more user friendly.

2️⃣ Even if we go along with the theory that nofollow links don't hold any SEO value, there are many other awesome benefits to that coverage - brand mentions have SEO value, you're directing new traffic to the site, you're improving brand perceptions. Focus what you have gained not what you haven't gained.

3️⃣ YouTube search volume can be an underrated metric for certain types of "most searched for" campaigns that are more based around topics such as DIY, tutorials, etc, that better lend themselves to video formats.

4️⃣ If you don’t understand the data that you're using in your content, either ask the source of the data to clarify, or find another source. It'll save you an embarrassing conversation when a Journalist asks you questions about how the original data was sourced. If it's not clear then it's probably not reliable.

5️⃣ Campaigns that help collect user data are worth their weight in gold. This is a super underrated aspect of dream job campaigns. Don’t force it in but also don’t forget to consider it.

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 World University Rankings 2025

The latest edition of the World University Rankings published by Times Higher Education has recently been released. The study ranks universities around the world based on five metrics - teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook. It’s a great breakdown of the “best” universities which you can filter by lots of criteria such as the best universities for certain subjects, and the best for each of the five metrics analysed. This could be an interesting dataset to use in an Index ranking the best cities for students as one example.

2️⃣ Who Sampled

Who Sampled is one of my favourite websites on the whole internet. You know when you hear a part of a song and think “that bit sounds familiar where have I heard that before?”. Who Sampled is a database that records which songs have been sampled in other songs, and is the place that will give you the answer to questions like that. It can also be a great site for PR campaigns due to its data led nature. On the site you’ll be able to find things like the most sampled songs, most sampled artists, most sampled genres, and as you get more creative with your data analysis, you could also work out things like who a certain artist samples most often, which eras get sampled the most, or which songs have been most sampled in top 10 hits in the last decade.

3️⃣ Proportion of Women in Senior and Middle Management Positions by Country

International Labour Organization is home to some really fascinating datasets that I’ll no doubt be sharing more of in future issues. This dataset allows you to analyse the percentage of women in every country around the world that make up senior and middle management positions. The data is sourced from individual Labour Force studies in each country and is a huge timesaver to help you avoid collecting all of these datasets individually by yourself. The records go back to 2000, allowing you to also analyse plenty of comparison points, such as showing the countries where the percentage is increasing the most.

4️⃣ Australia Scam Statistics

This Scamwatch dashboard produced by the Australian Government is your go to resource for any stats you want relating to scams in Australia. The site has a ton of data that you can work your way through, including the demographics of people who get scammed, the most common scams, which scams are more likely to affect women, the elderly, etc, the financial loss of scams, and which states get scammed the most. The dashboard is really easy to use and filter your way through the data making for lots of different data stories that you could produce from this resource.

5️⃣ Fertility of Women in the United States

This final dataset is produced from the US Census Survey, and includes data on the number of children that US women have had by 5 year age brackets. There are different datasets which break the data down by race, ethnicity, education level, occupation, and where they live. An interesting dataset for analysing what age different types of women in the US give birth at, as well as profiles of women who aren’t parents.

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 Listen & Book by easyJet and Spotify

📊 21 RDs, 8 DR 50+

We all love a brand collab campaign and I really liked this one by easyJet and Spotify, who in 2022 teamed up together to create a tool that provides you with suggestions for your next holiday based on your Spotify listening data. It’s a great example of how two brands from different industries can come together in a way that’s a bit unusual, but also produces a campaign that is very relevant to both brands.

The way that the tool works is you simply connect your Spotify to easyJet’s tool so that it can analyse your listening history, and then it provides you with a series of suggestions for your next holiday based on the vibe of the songs you’ve been listening to. It’s a cool concept but but it’s also quite straight forward in execution. If you analyse the urls that the tool returns when it analyses your Spotify (there’s also an option to use the tool without connecting your Spotify by selecting what mood you’re in), there’s only six different moods that it will provide holiday suggestions for. Not all tools that you create for PR campaigns need to be massive data projects, the key is ensuring the storytelling via the tool is strong enough for Journalists to care about it.

2️⃣ The Future of Employee Benefits by Remote

📊 56 RDs, 27 DR 50+

This next campaign from Remote is a really detailed and in depth survey campaign that takes a deep dive into how workers feel about employee benefits. The survey covers 10,000 respondents across UK, US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, so covers a lot of ground while also providing angles for international markets, as well as comparisons of how employee views differ between the different countries.

Survey campaigns can be very expensive and I imagine this one was especially expensive given the sample size of 10,000. While that offers more creative freedom with the insights and analysis that you can create from the responses, it also creates more risk with the results needing to be relative to the survey budget to produce a good ROI.

One way that campaigns can produce lots of audience insights data for a survey campaign without a huge spend, is to run a survey via the brand’s own internal communications, such as their social media channels or their newsletter for example. If you’re able to target a good sample size via these methods then that can help to make survey style campaigns much more affordable, and therefore lower risk from a ROI point of view.

3️⃣ The Most Misheard Songs by WordFinder

📊 89 RDs, 26 DR 50+

I really like Music campaigns but I feel like they can be notoriously difficult to land coverage with. This is a good example of a Music campaign that did extremely well, earning nearly 100 backlinks. WordFinder surveyed Americans by providing them with a sound clip of famous songs and then giving them four options of what the lyrics were to identify which song lyrics were most often misheard.

For me personally, I would spend an eternity trying to nail down the seed list for a campaign like this. You really could spend forever finding different examples of misheard lyrics that you could include as part of the study. And then the more songs you include, the more expensive your survey is going to cost. Sometimes you have to accept that we’re creating PR campaigns on a budget and not publishing a research paper, and there will be limitations. While I’m sure there were some songs that would jump out as omissions to different people, the results from the campaign are proof that not including every single possible option in your seed list for something like this, usually works out ok.

4️⃣ The UK’s Greenest Cities by The Solar Centre

📊 63 RDs, 51 DR 50+

I really like this as an example of a well executed Index campaign by The Solar Centre from way back in 2019. They created an index ranking 59 cities across the UK by how green they are, analysing ranking factors such as CO2 emissions, recycling, green spaces and parks, and transport.

The landing page looks amazing and the colour scheme is really cool. I love when landing pages give off the vibe of the topic they’re about with things like images and colour schemes. There isn’t a lot of copy or analysis but I kinda like that in this case. I feel like sometimes we get lost in writing lots of analysis for our landing pages when it isn’t always needed (landing page copy and press release copy should often be quite different). I also like that they’ve created the final index score out of a nice round number like 10 to keep it simple to contextualise, although they could have done a better job of making it clear that the total score is out of 10.

5️⃣ The UK’s Greenest Towns & Cities by Compare The Market

📊 23 RDs, 11 DR 50+

I wanted to share this next campaign from Compare The Market as an example of how launching two similar campaigns can produce results for both brands. The above campaign from The Solar Centre first started picking up links in April 2019, and this one by Compare The Market was published in December 2019 - so sorta close together. But both managed to get a good number of links, with no overlap in the publications that covered each campaign too.

I always find it interesting when you find similar index campaigns with sorta similar ranking factors, and both produce completely different results, which was the case with these two campaigns. If you do have an idea that has been done before, don’t instantly put it in the ideas bin. Obviously, try to pivot the idea a little so it’s not EXACTLY the same. However, there are so many examples of similar campaigns like this that both do very well, so find a way to put your own unique spin on the idea and hopefully you’ll be able to achieve similar success as the idea you used for your inspiration.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 26. 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 🙂