THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 35

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 35 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.

editorial.link: The State of Link Building 2025 Report

BuzzStream: The Data Behind 7 Top Journalist Request Platforms

Louise Parker on LinkedIn: How to see the exact internet searches ChatGPT is doing to generate its answers, using a Chrome extension

Ahrefs: 76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From Top 10 Pages

Search Engine Journal: Google Integrates Search Console Insights Into Main Platform

Search Engine Land: 7 ways to grow brand mentions, a key metric for AI Overviews visibility

Sitebulb: Why Branded Queries Matter Now More Than Ever

Search Engine Land: AI search is booming, but SEO is still not dead

Press Gazette: Clickbait has become ‘self-perpetuating cycle’ drowning out genuine news

Press Gazette: PR agency sells AI tool which sends out automated expert comment to journalists

BuzzStream Podcast: The State of Digital News – With NewzDash’s John Shehata

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

1️⃣ Ahrefs has a free backlink checker tool - https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker. For free with no account you can quickly check the Domain Rating (Ahrefs’ version of Moz's DA), and number of backlinks and referring domains to any domain.

2️⃣ Check which sites are linking to your social pages and set up backlink alerts for when this happens. If they linked to one of your social pages they’ll probably also link to your website if you ask and explain why it would add value for them to do so.

3️⃣ How to very quickly find the best pages to add internal links to from your campaign page. Run a site search for your domain followed by your keyword to find what pages are relevant internal linking opportunities. For example, if you are a travel website and you're writing a blog about a specific destination, you could Google site:yourcooltraveldomain followed by the destination you're writing your current blog about to find relevant pages on your website to link to from your new blog post. This is great not just from an SEO pov to pass link value, but also to keep users on your site for longer and viewing more of your content.

4️⃣ The number of links that determine how successful your campaign is will be different for each campaign. It's all relative to what the strategy for that campaign is. Not every campaign needs to build even 10+ links to be considered a success.

5️⃣ Nobody needs to worry about your business being "boring". The people that find your business boring aren't your target audience. Produce content aimed at the people who don't think your business is boring.

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 Netflix First Half of 2025 Engagement Report

As well as the weekly Top 10 reports, Netflix also releases their “What We Watched” report which covers the total amount of views for any TV Show and Movie with over 100,000 views on the platform during the last six months (over 7,500 shows and more than 8,600 films in total). This report that they release twice a year provides amazing data on the popularity of titles available on Netflix and which are the most watched globally. As well as revealing the most watched shows and films, it’s also a great insight into which titles are the most evergreen and earning huge numbers of streams years after their release (for example, one of the biggest stand outs is the popularity of children’s shows and how evergreen that genre of content is).

2️⃣ Luminate 2025 Midyear Music Report

Speaking of midyear entertainment reports, Luminate release their own data insights report every six months on the music industry. The report has a whole host of different data points that provide audience insights data into how we consume music, what genres and artists we’re listening to, and the state of the music industry overall in 2025, with detailed geographical data for U.S. and Canada.

3️⃣ EA FC Player Ratings

If you’re producing sports campaigns then you have a whole world of team and player data available for you to create content around. A different type of data source that you may be sleeping on for Football campaigns is EA FC Player Ratings data. All of the player stats for every player in the game are available online via a user friendly interface, and could have some creative uses for campaigns.

4️⃣ CrimeRate

Crime data from various ONS sources is widely available but a lot of the time you have to apply a lot of your own data filtering and analysis to really make any use of it. CrimeRate is a fantastic site that gives you UK crime data specific to your local region and does a wonderful job of summarising data and trends in a much more user friendly manner. Once you enter your postcode or city you will get a report detailing figures such as the crime rate over time, how it compares against the average in your county and region, and the rate of specific crimes such as drugs, robbery, vehicle crime, and more. A really great resource for creating localised data stories, ranking the safest cities, or comparing the worst cities for specific crimes.

5️⃣ Country GDP over Time

This dataset by International Monetary Fund is a useful resource for comparing the growth or decline in the GDP of a country. Data isn’t available for every single country but it has more than enough to make a good map campaign out of, with GDP figures dating back to 1980, making it ideal for analysing historic data to reveal growth trends by country. You can also filter the GDP metric that you want to analyse, for example looking at GDP per capita or GDP based on purchasing power parity. For some reason the IMF site blocks the url with the beehiiv url tracking id on which I can’t remove from the newsletter, so if the link doesn’t open properly, just remove the url string after WEOWORLD/ and it should load.

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 Best Place to See the Sunrise and Sunset in Every Country by Zoma

📊 78 RDs, 33 DR 50+

I love a campaign where the campaign title peaks your interest straight away. This campaign by Zoma that has revealed the best place to see the sunrise and sunset in every country for me does just that. It’s also a great example of taking a topic that has a wide audience appeal in terms of sunsets, staying relevant and true to the brand (Zoma sell mattresses), and conducting the research in a way that produces lots of unique angles by ranking the best place in every country (with the assumption you’ll be using lots of countries in your outreach).

To research where the best places they’ve used one of my favourite data collection tactics which is text analysis of customer reviews. These reviews can be such a valuable data source as an alternative to surveys in revealing how people feel about a topic, place, etc. Here, Zoma analysed the reviews of places with the highest number of mentions of “sunset” and “sunrise” in their reviews.

I also love that they’ve expanded the dataset to reveal the best place in each state in America. Obviously doing so requires a lot of extra time and budget to be invested in the research, but it can massively help the results if you have a strong topic that you’re collecting data for. Of course you don’t have to collect all of your data all at once. If you’re unsure about how effective a campaign will be, you can always conduct part of your data collection and pitch those data points to get a feel of how receptive the media is to it before you expand the scope of your research from countries to states, cities, counties, etc.

2️⃣ NFL Fan Map: How America Roots for the NFL by Vivid Seats

📊 277 RDs, 32 DR 50+

Internal data can be such a valuable data source for PR campaigns, and Vivid Seats are one of the best brands out there at using their own data to create compelling data stories that enhance their link building activity. In this campaign they’ve analysed sales of tickets to NFL games via their platform to reveal which NFL team people in every county in America buy the most tickets to see play in person.

This campaign is a good example of spotlighting the difference between U.S. sports and European sports where every city has their own local team, even multiple ones, whereas in America not every state has an NFL team (and some states have multiple teams). All of which makes for a really fascinating data study that isn’t as obvious as it may first seem. For example, the county comparison in states that don’t have their own team, how team popularity can cross over into counties close to state borders, and the popularity split of states with more than one team.

3️⃣ TikTok’s Top Earners by Rave Reviews

📊 7 RDs, 4 DR 50+

Social media earnings campaigns are fairly common, but I really admire the ones that go a step further than just working out the potential earnings of accounts (which basically just turn into a list of who has the most followers), and actually research the number of ads that each account has posted in order to calculate their earnings. For me, it’s a much better methodology for working out social media earnings because I see too many campaigns “revealing” the massive amounts certain celebrities make on social media when I know very well that they don’t post ads so they aren’t making those figures.

This campaign is from 2021 so the list is outdated now, but that does provide an opportunity to build on it and update with a 2025 version, especially as the page is no longer live on Rave’s website. I really like as well how they’ve split the data up into categories to reveal the top earning influencers in different industries such as fitness, beauty, travel, food, and more.

4️⃣ The Sykes Staycation Index by Sykes Holiday Cottages

📊 68 RDs, 51 DR 50+

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while now you’ll know that I love index campaigns that brands repeat annually. This is a really great example of an index campaign by Sykes Holiday Cottages that brings all of the valuable aspects of an index campaign together. The report has a ton of insights from a combination of internal bookings data and a survey they conducted, to help them reveal the most popular places in the UK for vacations, which destinations bookings are increasing for, various travel trends, and more.

As well as being a great use of internal data, the campaign is inherently super on brand, and therefore does a great job of building topical authority around the brand’s core product of staycation holidays, in a way that goes beyond just a standard link building campaign that may get links but doesn’t really hold any brand value. Sykes have released the report each year since 2018 and it regularly gets press coverage and backlinks every year. The 2025 report has recently been released which you can read here.

5️⃣ The world’s most sustainable cities by Uswitch

📊 49 RDs, 26 DR 50+

The final campaign in this week’s issue is another Uswitch campaign (they invest heavily in Digital PR so naturally have created quite a few standout campaigns over the years). This one is an index campaign ranking the most sustainable cities in the world. For me, this is a fairly basic index campaign but as you can see from the number of referring domains the page has earned, sometimes basic is more than enough if it’s based around a topic that can be considered newsworthy.

It would be good if the landing page referenced how many cities the study looked at because some of the cities are not the usual major cities that you see included in the studies due to time and resource restraints. I really like that the campaign includes cities from a whole host of countries, but it is a good example of the value of being clear with your methodology not just in a press release but on a campaign page too. Press releases aren’t the only way that a potentially interested Journalist might find your campaign, so try and ensure the methodology on your campaign page is as detailed as possible.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 35. 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 🙂