THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 34

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 34 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 June

Digitaloft: Revealed: Hacked Sites & Expired Domains Are Being Used as Sources for ChatGPT’s Recommendations

Hard Numbers: What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and what you need to know as a Public Relations professional

Similarweb: The Impact of Generative AI on Publishers

Digitaloft: Digital PR measurement: the metrics that matter & the metrics that don’t

Digitaloft: Why nofollow links aren’t worthless, despite what many SEOs still believe

Digitaloft: The Role of Digital PR in Being Recommended by AI-Powered Search

Digitaloft: 7 Predictions for the Future of Digital PR in the Era of AI-Powered Search

Propellernet: The Digital PR Recap: Q2 2025

Bottled Imagination: How AI SEO and PR Intersect: What LLMs Like Gemini and ChatGPT Are Really Using to Rank Brands

Get Featured: What is 'Kill Mode'?

Tank: Pitching Isn’t Dead But It Has Evolved: What Journalists Expect in 2025

Motive PR: Using FOI requests as a digital PR campaign data source

Motive PR: How to use Reddit for Digital PR

Motive PR: How to use customer stories in your PR and marketing strategy

Wild PR: How to pitch to journalists as a PR professional

Bottle: How Digital PR is Redefining Brand Visibility in 2025

fatjoe: Brand Mentions: The New Backlinks For SEO?

Prowly: How to Measure the ROI of PR (With Metrics That Actually Matter)

Prowly: Best Media Database in 2025: Top 9 Tools for PR Pros

Idea Grove: 10 B2B PR Examples to Inspire Your Next Campaign

The PR Insider: How To Do Digital PR in France

Reboot: A guide to getting top-tier Spanish links

Stacker: The Real Cost of Great Content That Doesn’t Get Seen

Minty Digital: How to Appear in AI Search Results: Your AI Search Survival Guide

Minty Digital: Industry report: The State of Search in Travel 2025

editorial.link: 15 Off-Page SEO Techniques Google and AI Still Love

editorial.link: 6 Best Backlink Checker Tools for 2025

editorial.link: AI Search Optimization: How Backlinks and Mentions Help You Rank

PRmoment: How PR is using AI: food for thought

Muck Rack: Fundamentals of PR in GEO

Cision: Want More Media Coverage? Industry Experts Are Your Secret Weapon

Cision: How to Pitch Different Media Outlets: PR Guide for Print, Digital & Broadcast

PR Daily: The new PR playbook for an AI-driven media landscape

The HOTH: How Digital PR Helps You Show Up in AI Search

Connective3: Up North 2025 wrap up

Neil Mckeown on LinkedIn: Surviving a crisis when you’re thrown in

Steph Spyro on LinkedIn: A quick tip for PRs pitching to the Daily Express

The Press Gazette: Reach to ‘streamline’ sports teams into one hub with ‘around 50’ redundancies

Linking Out Loud Podcast: Using PR to Stand Out as a Lifestyle Brand w/ Danielle Neah Amponsah

BuzzStream Podcast: SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Changing with Cyrus Shepard

Digital PR Explained Podcast: How Thought Leadership Gets You On A Journalist’s Radar

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

1️⃣ Author bios are great for finding the key topics a Journalist specialises in. For example, if you have a regional story and you want to know who covers that town, do a site search for the site's author folder (e.g. site:https://www.mylondon.news/authors/) followed by your keyword and it will show your writers who mention that keyword in their bio. This will however bring you up a lot of old Journalists so check when their last article was.

2️⃣ Journalists don’t get all their stories from email pitches. Research what forums/reddits/influencers/etc they follow and utilise those platforms for extra chances of getting your story seen and picked up.

3️⃣ If you're publishing stories via the National World submission portal and you don't want your name appearing on the article, change the name on your YourWorld account to an alias name so that name appears on the article instead.

4️⃣ Sometimes whoever is reviewing your National World submission story will remove the links from your article, sometimes they won't. If you want to ensure your links are hyperlinked in the submission portal, copy the anchor text directly from somewhere like BuzzStream that has the link hyperlinked via anchor text, and it will appear as a link when you submit your article (it might still get removed but this is how you include them as there's no option to create your own hyperlinked text via the portal)

5️⃣ Journalists still need stories on a Friday too ;)

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 Reuters 2025 Digital News Report

The Reuters Digital News Report is one of my favourite reports for audience insights data into the state of the media and journalism in countries around the world. From a PR point of view there are so many great insights in this annual report to help influence your outreach strategy, for example by highlighting how people in your target country consume media, the most read publications, and how trusted the major national publications in each market are. It’s a big report (although two thirds of it are overviews of individual countries) but I definitely recommend having a read through the key relevant parts of it to help better understand the local media consumption habits in your key markets.

2️⃣ YouGov’s Most Recommended Brands 2025

YouGov regularly releases great audience insights reports like this one that came out last week on the brands in 10 key markets that consumers are most likely to recommend. Data like this can be great as a campaign data source, but also as a valuable audience behaviour resource (or if you’re fortunate enough to work with one of the top brands, a cool bit of research to share and brag about!). If you want to make sure you don’t miss any of these reports you can subscribe to get them delivered straight to your inbox as soon as they’re released.

3️⃣ FlixPatrol

While each individual streaming service publishes weekly and monthly charts of their most watched films and TV series, going through them all individually can be a tad time consuming. FlixPatrol is a great resource for curating all of those charts in one place to quickly see which shows and movies are currently trending across streaming platforms in different countries. You can also get a lot more data by clicking on each title which will show you cool insights such as where the show ranks in the top 10 chart across every country, and a timeline of how many hours were watched each week to see historical trends of how many viewing hours a show earned in its first week/month. FlixPatrol also has a premium tier with even more insights for $49/month.

4️⃣ Barb - UK Weekly top 50 shows

Speaking of TV viewing data, each week Barb publishes the top 50 most viewed programmes on traditional TV in the UK (although it has now started to incorporate some streaming services into its weekly charts). Barb is a great resource for data on the most viewed programmes and how many viewers they did, with historical data dating back decades. It’s also really useful for spotting trends in what the UK is watching, helping you to find new trending shows that you might want to create newsjacking stories around.

5️⃣ 2025 U.S. Tennis Participation Report

With the US Open starting at the end of August, this U.S. Tennis participation report which has been published annually since 2021 has a lot of interesting data insights into the popularity of Tennis in America. You’ll find data on topics such as the demographic data and income levels of people playing Tennis, the states with the highest rates of Tennis participation, and how popular other racquet sports such as Pickleball are.

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 The Trillion Dollar Club by Comparisun

📊 275 RDs, 176 DR 50+

One of the key trends that I spot with campaigns that do really big link numbers is their ability to combine the more niche topic that your client is looking to build authority in, with a more mainstream topic that will have a wider press and audience interest. This campaign by Comparisun, a company that supplies POS systems, uses a celebrity angle really well here to give a business and finance story a much stronger mainstream hook by revealing not just when the world’s richest companies will reach a $1 trillion valuation, but when the world’s richest people are expected to do so too. Looking through the top coverage for the campaign, it’s clear that the celebrity angle, and more specifically the Jeff Bezos angle, was the key driver in it becoming a campaign that earned over 400 backlinks from 275 referring domains.

The beauty of hero campaigns when done right is that they can work as an evergreen piece of content, but also as as a Reactive PR story when the opportunity arises. This was the case with this campaign as around six months after earning its first link, the news of Jezz Bezos actually becoming a trillionaire hit, and the number of linking domains to the campaign page quickly skyrocketed. This is a great reminder of the value of hero campaigns, and the importance of monitoring the news and creating web alerts to spot opportunities for when stories around your data start trending in the news that you can newsjack with your existing content.

2️⃣ Language Study Reveals The Happiest Music Fans by OnBuy

📊 71 RDs, 18 DR 50+

This campaign done by OnBuy in 2021 is a clever example of how to use text analysis of Reddit posts to create a sentiment analysis campaign. To discover which genre of music fans are the happiest, they analysed how often 15 of the most positive words were used across major Reddits for 27 music genres, to reveal which Reddits featured the highest proportion of positive comments. The research found that apparently Jazz fans are the happiest.

This is a great example of a methodology that can be a more cost effective alternative to paying for a survey campaign, while also providing you with a larger and more accurate dataset for your research. Unfortunately the graphics don’t load on any of the archived versions of the campaign page that is no longer live but you get the gist from the text.

3️⃣ The most in-demand designer knock-offs by Uswitch

📊 25 RDs, 10 DR 50+

With Digital PR becoming more and more competitive, quick to produce data-led campaigns are extremely valuable in helping us deliver quick results that stay within a tight budget and help to show clients results during the early stages of working together. Search volume campaigns can be great for quick turnaround content that when done right can deliver interesting insights and create a newsworthy story. As is always the case however, it’s the story that sells, not the format.

I like this as an example of fairly simple search volume campaign that has a strong hook from a storytelling point of view. Here, Uswitch analysed search volume data of keywords for fake knock off fashion brands to reveal the most in-demand counterfeit designer items. This is the kind of data insights that are interesting enough from a PR point of view but can also easily be collected and analysed in a day’s work. I also really like the safety tips at the end of the post on how to spot fake products and scam sites, along with comparing the YoY change from their previous study the year before.

4️⃣ The world’s most successful home influencers by GoCompare

📊 15 RDs, 11 DR 50+

This next campaign looking at how much home influencers earn by GoCompare is another good example of content that is fairly quick to produce but has a strong data hook and uses celebrity interest to make their data appealing to a mainstream audience, helping them to earn links on 15 unique sites.

Splitting the data to also look at the trend of Reality TV stars that have created Instagram accounts dedicated to their home renovations to reveal which are cashing in via that stream is a great added bit of analysis that earned them a second piece of coverage on The Tab, in addition to the main angle that they also covered.

Data on social media earnings are fairly simple to research, but some tools can give you inflated numbers. If you care about your figures being somewhat accurate and not just using the highest numbers possible then it’s fairly easy to contact agents and get quotes for sponsored posts from the accounts you’re analysing to get a more reliable estimate of which tools are providing you with the best data on potential earnings.

5️⃣ Sing for your supper by broadbandchoices

📊 14 RDs, 6 DR 50+

Continuing the trend of strong data-led campaigns that don’t have to take weeks to research and produce, this is another really good example. Here, broadbandchoices revealed how many streams on different platforms artists need to earn the minimum wage in 15 different countries.

This is a really great example of going a step further with your data analysis and combining two datasets together to transform a piece of data into a data-led story. Comparing the average pay per stream across different platforms is good solid content, but taking that figure and then researching how many streams artists need to earn just to make the minimum wage makes it a much more interesting story, and uses data to really effectively visualise just how many streams musicians need to make even a low income.

I’m also a fan of just focusing on 15 key markets rather than turning this into a map campaign with data for every country in the world, as most of that data for 90% of the countries you research goes unused, unless you’re planning some major outreach activity. Don’t collect data just for the sake of it - be effective but aim to be efficient too.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 34. 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

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 🙂