THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 39

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 39 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

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Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Screaming Frog: Ethical Storytelling in PR: Relevance, Reputation, Results

Prosperity Media: The Role and Impact of Data Analysis for Digital PR

PR Daily: Stop following this PR advice, readers say

No Brainer Agency: Are Reddit and Quora users the new influencers?

Siege Media: Digital PR for SaaS: The Secret to Turning Customer Data Into Industry-Relevant Studies

Hannah Bryce on LinkedIn: What’s really going to happen with AI and SEO?

Search Engine Land: How to protect your brand reputation in AI search

Inc.: Will AI Cite Your Brand?

Ross Simmonds: The ROI Of Generative Engine Optimization: The New Age of Content

Root Digital: Best Link Building Tools

Ahrefs: Search Everywhere Optimization: 5 Places to Optimize Beyond Google

Ahrefs: Generative Engine Optimization: Growth Strategies and Metrics For the AI Era

Semrush: How to Rank in Google’s AI Overviews: 7 Pro Tips

Siege Media: ChatGPT Referral Traffic Trends: Traffic Down in July 2025

Google: How to select your preferred sources in Top Stories in Search

Google: Flight Deals is our new, AI-powered flight search tool

Press Gazette: Top 50 English-language news sites in the world: All but four report traffic declines in July

Press Gazette: UK and US publishers say Google AI is harming website traffic

Press Gazette: Publisher traffic sources: Google steady but social and direct referrals are down

HoldtheFrontPage: Reach reveals new ways it plans to use AI in newsrooms

The Telegraph: Mirror and Express targeted for takeover that would sack a third of journalists

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Take SEO Ideas From Your Competitors with SiteCurve’s Shane Dutka

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Inside the PR Strategy of Cause-Driven Celebrity Campaigns

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

1️⃣ If your data doesn’t give you a strong enough headline, look at earlier versions of the dataset too. "42% of the UK feel unfulfilled" is a good headline, but "The amount of people feeling unfulfilled in the UK has increased 22% in the last 3 years" is even better.

2️⃣ New clients often want results quick, and agencies want to earn their trust quick as well. Look at quick turnaround projects you can work on in the first month to earn trust quick. Look at their existing content and think along the lines of quick to put together expert comments and data stories that can land coverage in your first month.

3️⃣ Reddit can be great for validating concepts before you start investing lots of time/budget into an idea. You're probably not going to want to use a Reddit user as your expert source, but it can be a great source for validating that a concept makes sense and would be accurate/reliable before trying to find a expert outside of Reddit.

4️⃣ If you're ranking countries/regions by the "best" or "most" something, you should really be weighting your results by population for a more accurate outcome. Otherwise your rankings are just going to be dominated by the biggest regions.

5️⃣ When doing a most searched for map, try to research if your top terms have different meanings/spellings in different countries that could skew your results. Are they also the name of a national brand that is in the news and skewing the results? If your data looks unusual then research why as there's probably a reason for 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 Forbes Billionaires List

Forbes’ Billionaires list is the go to resource for any campaigns analysing data on the super rich. The list covers every billionaire around the globe, and is updated in real time which is great for providing the most up to date data, and makes it a useful resource for newsjacking opportunities too. The list goes beyond just listing the billionaires and their net worths, with data points including their annual growth in net worth, and the source of their wealth. You can also easily filter the list by age, gender, and country too, creating lots of room for creative analysis of the data.

2️⃣ Australian Bureau of Statistics

The Australian Bureau of Statistics is the Aussie version of ONS in the UK, and provides a huge amount of datasets that could be used as data sources for PR campaigns. The release calendar is a super useful page to keep bookmarked and check in on each month to find new datasets that could be of use for your stories, and the data explorer page makes analysing and comparing datasets really user friendly.

3️⃣ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics contains so many amazing datasets related to employment and spending. As is the case with the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I suggest keeping the latest releases page bookmarked. BLS also has a great release calendar that is super for spotting upcoming releases so that you can use them as soon as they’re released before anyone else.

4️⃣ YunoJuno Freelancer Rates Report

YunoJuno’s freelancer rates report is a great resource if you want to do any analysis of the rates charged by freelancers across different sectors. Data points include the daily and hourly rates, and average contract lengths for work sourced through the YunoJuno platform. The data covers bookings from 2022-2024, with the report also providing comparison points to spot changes from year to year.

5️⃣ World Athletics Top All-Time Performances Dataset

This Kaggle dataset is a goldmine of data for anyone looking to analyse track and field performances dating back to 1958. As well as the race results and race times/distances from every World Athletics event, the dataset also includes some really interesting data points that could make some for great creative analysis, for example, the wind speed during each event, and the age of the athlete at the time.

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 Ole Gunnar Solskjaer effect sees a huge spike in Manchester's tourism by Thomas Cook Sport

I love campaigns that are able to produce a PR story that combines two industries in a relevant and effective way, and this example by Thomas Cook Sport was a really great use of that strategy. Thomas Cook Sport offers sports themed travel packages so has an organic built in relevance to not just travel stories, but sports ones too.

Here, they masterfully combined the use of their own internal data with a newsjacking story by noticing that following the appointment of Norwegian Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as Man Utd manager in 2018, there was an increase in football bookings of 89% compared with the same period last year, with 20% of those sales coming directly Norway. They also saw a 138% increase in web traffic from Norway.

I love stories like this that are such a good example of combining a newsjacking strategy with your own internal data to have maximum impact on not just the coverage you can earn, but also the topical authority and brand building that you can benefit from via stories like this.

2️⃣ 2024 Duolingo Language Report by Duolingo

📊 66 RDs, 16 DR 50+

If you’ve been following the newsletter for a while now, you’ve probably worked out that I’m a huge fan of campaigns that make clever use of their own internal data for PR purposes. This is another really good example of how brands can be sitting on a goldmine of data that’s exclusive to them.

Duolingo are undoubtedly one of the best examples of brand marketing this decade, and their end of year language report is a great case study of how PR campaigns can be used not just for link building purposes, but as brand building assets too. The report has tons of great insights that are super relevant to their target audience including the most popular languages studied, and users’ motivations for learning a new language.

They’ve ran this report each year since 2020 with each report earning an average of 314 backlinks. That’s literally hundreds of backlinks and invaluable amounts of PR coverage every single year for the last five years, all from one campaign idea. Reports like this are so valuable when you can repeat them on an annual basis. Great campaign ideas are hard to come up with, so when you do latch on to something that works well, aim to replicate the content in different ways so that you get even more value from the content.

Not all campaign ideas will lend themselves to ranking for keywords, but when you can this is such a great extra layer of results that you can report on your campaign. To show the impact that Duolingo’s language report has on both SEO and brand metrics, the campaign pages bring in hundreds of monthly organic sessions each month, creating branded searches such as “duolingo stats” with a MSV of 310 and “duolingo most popular languages” at 150 MSV.

3️⃣ The World's 100 Sexiest Beaches by HomeToGo and Lovehoney

📊 21 RDs, 9 DR 50+

If there’s one campaign format that I’d love to see the Digital PR space use more often, it’s content collaborations with other brands. Obviously there’s a lot of barriers with this format and it does somewhat necessitate having the luxury of working with a big name brand, but when it can be done, there can be a lot of benefits to doing so, not least being the ability to tap into each other’s audiences.

In this example, HomeToGo, a global holiday rentals site, paired up with sexual wellness brand Lovehoney, working together to create a ranking of the world’s top 100 sexiest beaches. From a brand point of view, the index works really well, seamlessly hitting on the brand focuses of each brand in a way that works well together.

The data side of the index is also very strong, using internal data to rank the destinations with the average traveller group closest to two to focus on popularity with couples, weather data to rank the hottest beaches, Instagram hashtags on each beach that mention the sunset, the number of nearby romantic restaurants, and how LGBTQIA+ friendly the beach’s destination is.

Ranking the top 100 rather than just top 10 opens up a massive number of regional angles that you can target with an index campaign like this. Looking through the regions that have linked to the campaign page, it’s interesting to note that none of them are for cities featured in the top 10. The three main regions covered were Ireland, whose only beach is ranked #87, Oregon, where one beach ranks #66, and Florida, where there are five beaches but the best ranked is only at #33. Which goes to show that particularly when the index is ranking places on a global level, you don’t have to focus exclusively on your top 10 to earn coverage.

This is also another campaign that has been able to take advantage of creating a campaign page that can rank for keywords and generate organic traffic, this time for non-branded keywords. For example, the page ranks #5 in the U.S. for “sexy beach” (MSV of 1,600) and #3 in America for “sexiest beaches in the world” (MSV of 80).

4️⃣ What Percentage of Businesses Fail? by Vena

📊 28 RDs, 7 DR 50+

Another campaign format that I’m a big fan of is statistics posts. This example by Vena is a detailed analysis of business failure rates in America, revealing how soon new businesses shut down, and which states have the highest and lowest rates of business failures.

Content like this is great for naturally showcasing really strong E-E-A-T signals and establishing your topical authority around your chosen topic. While many statistics posts are more of a curated roundup of data points from various sources, this one is a nice blend between that format and a more traditional data-led PR campaign, focusing primarily on U.S. BLS data. The page also does a great job of providing valuable content that goes beyond just sharing some statistics by detailing common causes of business failure, and case studies of successful business resilience, another great way of further showcasing those important E-E-A-T signals.

One of the biggest rewards to be gained from statistics posts is their ability to rank for evergreen keywords such as “[topic] stats”. This page is earning around 40 monthly organic sessions, which isn’t currently very high. However, it’s important to note that the page is less than a year old, and it does often take time for pages to rank for keywords, especially competitive ones that will drive traffic. Where these pages really pay dividends is through their evergreen nature and being able to produce sustainable results over a long period of time.

5️⃣ Branding Statistics by CapitalOne

📊 171 RDs, 42 DR 50+

This final campaign is another example of a very well executed statistics post. Here, Capital One have created a giant list of branding statistics, curating stats from 36 different data sources. The campaign page has been linked to 322 times from 171 different domains, and has been earning links consistently over the last 18 months since the page was first launched, showing the value of this format as a sustainable evergreen link building asset.

The landing page itself isn’t all that great from a UX point of view, but that clearly doesn’t stop it achieving its goal of earning links. I do think mentioning the source of each individual stat would help the user understand where each one has been sourced from though, rather than just having a big list of references at the end.

The page isn’t driving much organic traffic currently, but as previously mentioned, ranking for keywords like “branding statistics” takes time, especially when the competition for page one rankings is high. For context, the pages currently ranking on page one have an average of 541 backlinks, with the top ranking page at 2,744 backlinks. Despite that however, Capital One’s page has already earned 322 backlinks, showing that posts like this can earn lots of links, even while climbing up the rankings for their most competitive target keywords.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 39. 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 🙂