THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 31

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 31 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 May

Bottled Imagination: Taught by headlines: How earned media affects LLM output

BuzzStream: Does (Email) Length Matter? What 5M Emails Tells Us About Engagement

Press Gazette: New London culture title to launch in September with five-strong team

Press Gazette: Telegraph withdraws banker school fees story after being deceived by source

Ahrefs: How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?

The PR Hotline: What You Should Do After Being Made Redundant In An Agency with Maja Adam

BuzzStream Podcast: How AI Is Reshaping Digital PR Workflows – with Authority Hacker’s Mark Webster

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

1️⃣ Ask someone who knows nothing about your campaign to read your outreach email and then tell you as much as they can about your campaign. Take note of what was missing, what was wrong, and amend your outreach email based on that feedback.

2️⃣ Your pitch should be helping to solve a problem for the Journo's readers. What's that problem? Work backwards from that. E.g. Problem --> People are looking for ways to keep bills down. Solution --> Here is some data showing how much money you can save via these changes.

3️⃣ If your lead angle isn't hitting, break your data down in more micro detail and go more niche. Categorise your dataset, focus on the worst rather than the best, go more localised. This makes your angle more relevant

4️⃣ The end goal of any content campaign is ultimately to get people to read your content. Don't neglect the real life impact your content might have on people reading it.

5️⃣ Just because your idea has been done before does not mean that it can’t be done again. Obviously don’t just blatantly plagiarise it, try to find how you can take a new approach to the same topic or utilise a different methodology to put your own spin on the idea.

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 UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2025

UK Finance have recently released their Annual Fraud Report for 2025. The report contains a ton of interesting data and insights into the UK fraud industry. Most of the data dates back to 2015, with data points including the source of the fraud, prevented frauds, stats on card fraud, cheque fraud, remote banking fraud, and much more.

2️⃣ Evolution of Height Over Time by Country

The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration has a lot of interesting datasets and this one has a many different potential uses. Using this tool you can see the mean height of male and female children and young adults across 200 countries, dating back to 1985. It’s a great resource for finding data such as the tallest and smallest countries, the countries with the biggest gender disparity in height, or which countries are growing the most.

3️⃣ US Adoption Rates by Country

These reports detail figures on adoptions by American families, with reports dating back to 2008. The data available through these reports includes the top countries that Americans adopt children from, the number of adoptions by state, and the cost of adoptions from each country.

4️⃣ State-Specific Foster Care Data 2022

This next dataset has data on the number of children entering foster care in each state in America. 2022 is the latest fiscal year that data is available for, but previous years are available too. The data is also broken down by the race of the child entering foster care.

5️⃣ France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies

This last one is a bit niche, but if you’re ever looking for data on the French population and economy, their National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies is the place to go. It’s France’s equivalent of ONS with datasets on topics like inflation rates, unemployment rates, household incomes, and much more.

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 Most Common Passwords by NordPass

📊 4,774 RDs, 1,507 DR 50+

This campaign by NordPass is about as effective of a Digital PR campaign as you’ll see. For the past six years, NordPass have revealed the most common passwords used across 44 different countries. I’m a huge advocate for report campaigns that can be updated annually and this is one of the best examples of one. By updating the list each year (even though the results don’t really change that much), NordPass are able to produce a campaign that requires no extra ideation time, and earns close to a thousand links every single year.

The campaign is also super on brand for NordPass which only makes it better. As well as an insane influx of backlinks from basically every major publication across multiple markets, the campaign page also ranks for over 19,000 keywords globally and drives nearly 7,000 organic sessions a month. As far as campaigns that tick all the major boxes, this one is about as good as it gets.

2️⃣ The Big Mac Index by The Economist

📊 2,322 RDs, 767 DR 50+

The Big Mac Index might be one of the oldest examples of an index style PR campaign. The Economist have been producing The Big Mac Index since 1984, and if you’ve been working in PR for a number of years there’s a very good chance you’ve come across it at some point. The index compares the price of a McDonalds Big Mac across different countries to analyse how the conversion rate of the price compares against the actual economy’s currency conversion rate.

It’s a terrific example of taking a topic in currency conversion rates that is a bit boring to most people, and blending it with a much more mainstream topic that is more consumer focused in McDonalds. If you’ve got a niche product that you’re trying to earn more mainstream coverage for, try and find another more naturally consumer focused topic that you can pair it with.

The Economist have also done a great job of taking a campaign created in 1984 and utilising it in the digital age to enhance their SEO performance. The index is regularly updated which gives it a regular influx of new links, and has become a cultural phenomenon to the point that “big mac index” has 27.7k monthly global searches.

3️⃣ Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster

📊 944 RDs, 272 DR 50+

This campaign by Merriam-Webster (the dictionary) is such a cool example of how a campaign that is super on brand can be extremely effective and earn more results than a ton of less relevant campaigns. Sometimes all you need is one really fucking good idea that you can keep updated with new data and new angles. That’s what Merriam-Webster have done here with their time traveler campaign that shows you which words were used for the first time in print in your selected year.

The landing page is really well put together and is full of surprising insights on words/phrases that are a lot newer or older than you probably expect. Some of my favourites - nobody used “life hack” before 2004, the first time “touch grass” was used was 2016, “hot take” is only 13 years old, and “GOAT” dates all the way back to 1996.

4️⃣ How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? by The Pudding

📊 1,022 RDs, 437 DR 50+

The Pudding produce some incredible content, and this is one of my favourites that they’ve ever done. A lot of us think of AI tools used for campaigns as a fairly new format, but they’ve been going for a long time in the content creation world, just with a much higher barrier to entry back then. Back in 2021 The Pudding created this amazing AI tool that analysed your Spotify/Apple Music listening data and told you how bad your listening tastes are.

What I really LOVE about the tool is that it’s fucking hilarious. Most AI bots like this are great for providing some clever data insights to you, but very few actually have a built in personality with sass and humour like this one does. The way that it’s built to chat to you while it’s processing the data is super clever and incredibly amusing/insulting. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time to use and get roasted by a robot. Oh yeah, and it’s a juggernaut of a link building asset too. Cool shit gets links.

5️⃣ How much house can I afford? by Bankrate

📊 1,284 RDs, 130 DR 50+

Bangers only in this week’s campaign inspo section. Thankfully the campaign and it’s results are a lot better than the heading that Bankrate used for the landing page. I did not come up with “How much house can I afford?” lol. Despite the weird title, the tool is really great.

After inputting your income, monthly debt, down payment, interest rate, and loan term, Bankrate’s calculator will tell you how expensive of a house you can currently afford. Calculator tools can be such great link building assets, especially when they help your target audience solve a very real problem that they face. Here, Bankrate have highlighted one of the biggest problems that their users need to solve and provided the perfect tool as a solution to their problem. The tool itself is great for authority building and establishing brand trust, but all of the extra advice on the landing page really rounds off a great campaign page.

The great added benefit of creating content that helps solve user problems is that there’s nearly always search volume for keywords that you can target from users searching for solutions to that problem. Campaigns that get tons of links are great, but campaigns that get tons of links AND generate a regular supply of organic traffic are even better. This home affordability calculator for Bankrate has earned them over 11,000 backlinks from more than 1,200 sites, and on top of that also ranks for over 9,000 keywords that drive 11,000+ monthly organic sessions globally.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 31. 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 🙂