THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 40

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 40 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: One Year As A Freelancer: Here’s What I’ve Learned

BuzzStream: Is Link Building Dead? (15 Data Studies Behind the Clickbait)

Motive PR: Six KPIs to track digital PR campaigns (that aren't backlinks)

Motive PR: Local and regional PR: What it is and why it matters

Motive PR: How travel brands can use seasonality to drive bookings all year round

Cision: Thinking of a Career in PR? What You Need to Know

Aliyah Loughlan on LinkedIn: Launched a campaign and had a week of crickets? 🦗 Here’s a few tweaks I always swear by to get media cut through

Clara Soteras: The Future of SEO for News Publishers in 2025: Crafting the Perfect Recipe for the Best Summer Ice Cream

fatjoe: This Is How To Track AI Traffic (in GA4)

Ahrefs: Is ChatGPT Really Powered by Google? 118,931 Fan-Out Queries Analyzed

Search Engine Land: Google’s great clarity cleanup: 3 shifts redefining the Knowledge Graph and its AI future

Moz: How To Speak the Language of Your Top SEO Stakeholders

Press Gazette: Reach to ‘radically reorganise’ editorial structure with one live news team

Press Gazette: Wired and Business Insider remove ‘AI-written’ freelance articles

Tom’s Guide: ChatGPT Is Using Google Search To Answer Your Questions — Here’s What We Know

Google: AI Mode in Search gets new agentic features and expands globally

BuzzStream Podcast: Building Your Personal Brand in PR w/ Grace Burton

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

1️⃣ To get insight into what type of comments Journalists need for Journo Request stories, look at the stories on similar topics they ran in the past and analyse what comments were used. Or for a specific Journalist, go through their recent stories to spot trends in their expert comments.

2️⃣ Be careful about using overly complicated technical industry jargon in your outreach without explaining what it means. It might make sense to you and people with knowledge of that industry, but it might confuse the people you're pitching to and/or the people reading your content.

3️⃣ Although tracking clicks in your pitch email is interesting, they can result in a huge SEO loss. The tracking means your urls redirect via a third party domain. If a Journalist then copy and pastes that tracking url it's technically a link to the tracking site not yours, resulting in no SEO value being passed through to your domain.

4️⃣ Pitching a campaign in the U.S.? Don't forget to target radio stations which can be fantastic for earning coverage at scale. They're great for UK outreach too but there's loads more of them in the U.S. that cover great content campaigns.

5️⃣ If you've found a site that has awesome data for your campaign but they don't make it publicly available, just ask them if they could share it with you for your campaign (and explain the benefits to them to sweeten the deal). Worst case they ignore you and you've lost nothing.

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 The 2025 Pinterest Autumn Trend Report

Pinterest’s seasonal trend reports provide a wide array of content inspo for PRs all around the world, whether it’s using the trending metrics for data content, or as the basis for expert commentary. Shakira Sacks has a great little TLDR round up of the report which you can read here.

2️⃣ Menu with Price

Menu with Price is a fab site that catalogues the prices of fast food menus in America. What makes this a really interesting dataset for me is that you can filter the menu prices by state, allowing you to compare the prices of a McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Starbucks, etc, in each state to analyse where in the U.S. each chain costs the most, or better yet, is the most expensive relative to the average income per state. The site also lists calorie information on each product which is another interesting data point to analyse.

3️⃣ all text in nyc

all text in nyc is a fascinating tool that finds text in New York City's Google Street View images. The tool analyses analyses everything captured by Google Images from 2007 to 2024, including street signs, shop signs, graffiti, and even people’s clothing, allowing you to search for any keyword and see everywhere that the text is present on the streets of New York City. The Pudding recently published an awesome piece analysing a lot of trends using the tool, but there’s still plenty of other creative uses looking at specific topics/industries that this tool could be used for.

4️⃣ FAOSTAT

FAOSTAT is the database of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations which contains some very interesting datasets. There’s a load of different data reports available, but some of my favourites include data on the foods produced per country, each country’s top imported and exported foods, and the affordability of a healthy diet per country. The site is also really easy to use for building your own reports within the tool, or easily exporting all of the data at once.

5️⃣ Senior Centers

Senior Centers is a search engine specifically for finding senior centers in each state/city of America. On each senior center location page, there’s also a very handy breakdown of the percentage of people in that city aged 60+, 62+, 65+, 75+ and 85+, as well as an old-age dependency ratio. Definitely a useful data source for any U.S. campaigns related to the best states for seniors to live in.

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 How Much Does a Wedding Cost? by Hitched

📊 745 RDs, 232 DR 50+

I love a good industry report campaign and Hitched’s National Wedding Survey is one of the very best examples of how to run an report campaign that’s well executed not just for PR goals, but to achieve SEO success too. Hitched have been running the annual survey for close to a decade now which becomes incredibly value in establishing your brand as an authority on a topic. One off reports can be super impactful, but for people to really start remembering your brand and actively associating it with specific topics and/or emotions, brands need to consistently be getting in front of their target audience.

That’s one of the many reasons I love report campaigns so much, they hit both short term and long term goals. For example, as of the end of 2020, the campaign page had links from 81 referring domains. It’s now up to 745 and nearly 1,300 backlinks. Sustainable link building in full effect. That longevity and brand building focus of the campaign also pays off in SEO terms.

The campaign page currently drives over 5,000 monthly organic sessions, ranking at the top of SERPs for high volume keywords such as “average wedding cost” (11,000 MSV) and “how much does a wedding cost” (2,600 MSV). That scale of traffic doesn’t come overnight either. At the end of 2020 the page was earning around 1,000 monthly organic sessions, increasing 5x since then. If ever you needed convincing that PR and SEO are long term strategies that pay dividends for great consistent work over time, those figures certainly prove so.

I love the landing page too. It conveys the key points of the data in a simple and concise way (something I feel a lot of campaign pages tend to struggle achieving), the infographics look amazing, they’ve incorporated video content to help the campaign work for other channels too, and the constant reference points to how trends have changed compared to previous years of the survey is another great example of the value to be gained from running annual reports and sticking with them.

2️⃣ The Backpacker Index by Alpha Travel Insurance

📊 33 RDs, 7 DR 50+

Speaking of landing pages that look great, this campaign page by Alpha Travel Insurance that analysed Europe’s most and least affordable cities for backpackers has some beautiful data vis. You can tell this is a campaign from back in the day where Digital PR teams invested heavily in design and dev costs to produce really user friendly landing pages. Sadly these days there’s been a switch towards more basic landing pages (which I totally understand from a budget pov), and worse yet, campaigns with no on-site content (a big pet peeve of mine).

What’s interesting about this campaign and the fact that it performed well from a link building pov is that the original source of the data comes from a different Backpacker Index created by Price of Travel. I’m usually on the fence when it comes to campaigns that mostly repurpose an existing study that someone else has done, but the key is that your campaign is adding something new, which Alpha’s landing page achieves through their interactive breakdown of the data. The colour coding of the different metrics is great, and adding the option to filter the charts to see the top cities for each metric also really helps in making it a much more user friendly resource than the original source of the data is.

3️⃣ The World’s Best Countries for Pensions by Blacktower

📊 27 RDs, 14 DR 50+

By pure coincidence, the next campaign that I’ve picked out also happens to be a campaign that takes a large part of its data straight from another report conducted by someone else. Here, Blacktower revealed the world’s best countires for pensions in 2024, with the Netherlands, Iceland and Denmark coming out on top (UK is 14th). Interestingly, the Dutch contribute a massive 28% of their wages to their pensions.

I don’t like this one as much, but I do think they’ve added some extra data points from a second source, although it’s hard to really understand which data point is from which source, and the overall index score is the exact same as the index scores from the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index 2024.

That said, the key lesson is that you can use studies conducted by other brands to form your own campaigns and still achieve strong results from a link building pov. As I mentioned before however, the important part is to add some new/different value with your campaign, whether that’s combining multiple studies together, adding expert analysis, or transforming the data into a more user friendly resource.

4️⃣ The 51 Most & Least Dog-Friendly Countries by The Swiftiest

📊 27 RDs, 8 DR 50+

This next campaign is a very well created index. The Swiftiest set out to find the most and least dog-friendly countries by ranking 51 countries against eight different metrics such as animal protection, pet friendly hotels and vets per capita, and laws against animal abuse. The ranking factors looking at animal abuse laws such as if animal sentience has been formally recognised and if dog meat is common food in that country are a great touch in my opinion. Metrics like these allow the Index to go beyond just your standard ranking factors such as the number of vets and pet friendly places.

The landing page is also really well put together with great visuals and a breakdown of the best and worst countries for each ranking factor. One of my favourite aspects of Index campaigns is how you can create a unique ranking angle for the best and worst places, not just overall, but also for each individual factor. This allows you to create a wider range of regional stories if one region doesn’t rank super high or low overall, but is the best/worst for one specific factor.

5️⃣ United Kingdom of Cats and Dogs by Sainsburys

📊 12 RDs, 5 DR 50+

The final campaign this week was done by Sainsburys way back in 2017 looks at which cities are more likely to be dog lovers vs cat lovers, and is a clever example of how you can use internal sales data to reveal interesting audience insights that allow you to create a compelling story for your PR campaign.

There’s a few things that I don’t love about the campaign page that make the data side of the campaign quite unclear. For example, it’s not super clear if it’s based on internal customer data from their pet insurance database, or if some or all of it is based on survey responses (I’m assuming internal data). The landing page is also pretty basic and doesn’t allow you to really dig into the data and compare cities.

That said though, I really like the postcode tool that lets you lookup data specific to your location on if it’s a dog city vs a cat city, and what the top dog and cat breeds in your city are. Overall, it’s a cool example of what you can do with internal data sourced from a pet brand to provide audience insights data, potentially with bespoke regional data for as many regional news sites as you want to target.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 40. 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 🙂