THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 44

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 44 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.

The PR Insider: How to Cope with Burnout in PR as a Recent Graduate

Motive PR: How to use celebrity influencers to supercharge campaigns

Minty Digital: Don’t Scrap It Yet: Smart Ways to Reangle Your Data-Led Campaigns

Embryo: 5 ways to ensure your PR strategy is set up for Q4 success

Cision: How to Plan Your Product Launch PR Campaign

Energy PR: How To Make Your Surveys Work Harder For You

PRmoment: Can journalists easily switch to PR?

Shakira Sacks on LinkedIn: I’ve noticed that the best PR ideas usually tick a few boxes:

Rosie Taylor on LinkedIn: PRs: can you please stop taking screenshots of journo requests made on closed request sites and sharing them on LinkedIn

Em Newton on LinkedIn: Here's how you can reassure journalists that spokespeople are legitimate

OpenAI: How people are using ChatGPT

Google: New AI Features for Chrome

BuzzStream Podcast: Mastering Reactive PR and Newsjacking with Katie Storey

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

1️⃣ archive.ph is (imo at least) the best site for viewing content behind paywalls. Just pop your url in and you can see the page without the paywall (sometimes it can lag a bit loading so close and try again if it does). There's also a Chrome extension that makes it even quicker to remove the paywall. If you're trying to view a lot of stories on one site behind a paywall then get a subscription, but obviously as PRs that isn't always feasible to just to check a one off piece of coverage.

2️⃣ Links behind paywalls will still pass link value. These sites are set up so that Googlebot can crawl the page without the paywall. If they didn’t they’d be butchering their own SEO performance.

3️⃣ If you have a campaign that includes a lot of unique stats, optimise your post for searches like "link building statistics". This is what someone looking to use your research might search for. If they find them from your post there's a good chance they'll use them and then link.

4️⃣ Please be vigilant when putting campaigns out into the world that 🤞 will be seen by a lot of people, that the accuracy/reliability of your data is airtight. Our data often isn't stringently fact checked and trusted to be taken at face value so it's on us to do so ourselves.

5️⃣ The best ideation tip is research. Research and analyse what everyone in the industry is doing. Ideas will stick that you can replicate but you can't replicate anything if you've never seen it in the first place.

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 2024 Travel Trends Report

This recently released ONS report is a real treasure trove of information on the UK tourism industry. There’s a huge amount of data in these reports, some of the most intriguing data points for me are being able to see the number of visits outside the UK, the total number of nights and how much people spend when travelling abroad, and the reason for travelling such as holiday, business trips, visiting family. The report breaks down these data points for each area in Great Britain and the top 50 cities (excluding Northern Ireland for the regional breakdown) so you can see travel trends such as how many days people spend abroad and why they travel for each city, and which country they travel to (it doesn’t include every single country but lists all of the major travel destinations individually). You can also see which countries are visiting the UK the most, and which region they visit (this part isn’t available by area/city sadly). One of the most intriguing ONS datasets that I’ve seen for pure scope of PR campaign ideas.

2️⃣ Child mental ill health and absence from school in England 2021-2022

Another recently released ONS dataset, this one details the relationship between a child’s mental ill health and their absence from school. Unlike most ONS datasets it’s not the most user friendly but there is some really interesting insights if you’re interested in the topics of education and mental health in children. The gist of the report is that it lists the chances of children experiencing ill mental health by each percentage point of their school attendance (so 0-100% absence rate each listed individually), based on a number of factors such as if the child has a chronic physical condition or is eligible for free school meals. As the figures are listed for each individual percentage point you likely need to do a bit of data grouping to turn the data groups into a larger sample size, but once you do that this report could provide some really interesting and educational insights for a cause driven PR campaign.

3️⃣ Statistics of U.S. Businesses

This next dataset from the U.S. Census is a fantastic report on the number of businesses in America. The data is very detailed and provides you with a breakdown of the number of businesses, number of employees, and even the annual payroll, all of which is broken down by state, industry, and size of the business. In total there’s 1,383 different industries listed so this is a real great report for analysis of specific industries. Although the data is correct as of 2022 it is the most recently released data as of 2025.

4️⃣ Percent change in number of U.S. business establishments by state 2025 vs 2024

If you do need more up to date data on the number of U.S. businesses however, the U.S. Census isn’t the only source of this data, you can also get figures from the Bureau of Labour Statistics. On this page you can filter between a number of different map graphics which nicely illustrate the different datasets broken down by state. This one here is a nice simple overview of the number of businesses in each state in 2025, and the percentage growth/decline vs 2024.

5️⃣ U.S. Fraud Reports by State

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission provide regularly updated data on fraud reports which you can find here. I really like how they create Tableau sheets to break the data down into different reports which are nice and user friendly. The linked to report provides a breakdown of fraud reports by the type of report, the state they were reported in, the number of reports, and the total financial loss of each type of fraud, with data going back to 2020. The data can also be broken down by metro area, payment methods, and age group of the fraud victim.

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 True Size Of ...

📊 4,859 RDs, 909 DR 50+

This first campaign is a great example of how profitable creating a somewhat simple interactive asset can be. The True Size Of… is an online tool that lets you see how big a country is when placed directly over the top of another nation. The idea is relatively basic but the execution is really good, and great proof of the value of making your assets user friendly.

Over 48,000 backlinks from nearly 5,000 unique domains is really impressive, but it’s not just links that are the measure of success. The site earns over 400,000 organic sessions a month from all over the world, with 74,000 monthly searches globally for “the true size of”, as well as non-branded searches like “real size of countries” (27,000 MSV). That amount of regular traffic creates a great monetisation opportunity, which based on the number of Google Ads that get plastered on the site, they’re well and truly taking advantage of.

There’s plenty of similar examples of useful interactive content assets like this online that people have created which produce crazy results, but many of them don’t seem to be produced by brands. I think there’s a real opportunity for more brands to invest in this type of content creation as part of their SEO strategies, especially when you see the potential traffic numbers that they generate.

2️⃣ The true depth of the UK's pothole problem by Confused.com

📊 21 RDs, 8 DR 50+

Speaking of impressive online tools, this is a tremendous example of how to turn a relatively simple bit of data research into a really creative piece of content via some clever data presentation. All the way back in 2017, Confused.com conducted a FOI campaign to reveal the number of potholes in each region of the UK. Most campaigns would probably present this as a table, or maybe a chart, listing the regions with the most total number of potholes, possibly also including the regions with the damage caused by potholes, or cost for councils to repair them. And that makes for a really good campaign!

This campaign however goes in a different direction which is a fantastic way of putting the shocking findings of your data into a context that is much easier for the average person to understand and also be able to comprehend the shocking nature of your data. The page is no longer live but thankfully the Wayback Machine archive of the page still works properly.

When you select your chosen region, if you scroll down the page it creates a visual experience showing you how far underground the total depth of all the potholes in your chosen region go, with lots of comparisons to different attractions such as the depth of Loch Ness, the bottom of the English Channel, and the UK’s deepest cave. The further you go down the more crazy the comparison points get, for example, the location of the Titanic at a depth of 3,800m, and the boundary between Earth’s crust and upper mantel at 30,000m. Then after quite a long scroll you finally get to the total depth of all of the potholes in the UK at 40,456m. Which sounds very big, but the average person won’t really be able to contextualise it. So when the tool tells you that the total depth of all the potholes in the UK is 3.7 times the depth of the Pacific Ocean, and the same height as 26,971 cars, you’ve suddenly got a data point that is significantly more shocking, and thus more newsworthy.

Sometimes all you need to make a data point more newsworthy is something to compare it to that helps to give the reader better context to the story you’re telling, and give them a nudge in the right direction of the emotional response you want them to feel. The evidence of which comes with coverage headlines such as “Potholes in Surrey: New figures reveal the true depth of Surrey's pothole epidemic - and it's deeper than the English Channel”.

3️⃣ How much is your data really worth to criminals? by Money Guru

📊 45 RDs, 24 DR 50+

This next campaign was produced by Money Guru in 2018 when they revealed the surprisingly cheap cost that your online identity might be being sold for on the dark web. It’s another really good example of the importance of having a strong emotional hook to your campaign and not looking past the fact that your campaigns should be telling a story, not just presenting some data points that you’ve researched.

The campaign page is pretty basic but it serves its purpose and does a good job of emphasising the most important aspect of the campaign, the surprising ease at which your personal details can be acquired online by cyber criminals - less than £750 when this campaign was created. Again, the proof of how valuable focusing on stories that elicit a strong emotion from your target audience is in the headlines that they create. Money Guru’s data was covered on top publications such as Daily Mail, The Independent, The Sun, Metro, and more, with headlines including “ Hackers are selling Facebook logins on the dark web for just £2” and “Facebook logins for sale on the dark web for just $3.90 each”.

Sometimes in PR you also need a bit of luck to help your campaign pick up coverage. Much of the campaign’s top coverage came off the back of a major Facebook hack which compromised 50 million users. Money Guru’s stats were mentioned in many news articles covering that story rather than just creating an article all about their campaign. Even if your campaign isn’t a huge hit when you first launch it, you never know when it may become super newsworthy thanks to a trending news story. To ensure you don’t miss these opportunities, set up alerts for keywords related to all of the campaigns that you create and monitor relevant news sites so you can spot when stories break that present an opportunity to newsjack and get your previous campaigns included as part of a Journalist’s coverage of a story.

4️⃣ The True Cost of Living in UK Cities by ABC Finance

📊 54 RDs, 15 DR 50+

Next up, we have a campaign first launched by ABC Finance in 2018 which used ONS and Numbeo data to reveal the UK cities with the highest and lowest average disposable income. I like this campaign as a good example of how combining two datasets together can give you a good unique data story that becomes far more interesting than just ranking places based on one individual metric, and in a way that has a genuine use for a mainstream audience, and of course is super relevant for a finance brand to help establish their E-E-A-T and topical authority.

This campaign is also a great example of something I regularly advocate for which is keeping your successful campaigns up to date with new data (and thus, new angles to pitch). The page was first launched in 2018 and you can see an archived version of what the page looked like originally vs now. As you can see they’re clearly keeping the page updated so it has current data which helps to maintain it as a useful resource that people can use.

Unless you’re working for a brand with incredible SEO metrics, getting your campaign to rank for relevant keywords is usually a process that takes a bit of time, often over a year, by which time your original data might be outdated, and therefore no longer the most useful resource for Google to present to searchers. This is another reason why keeping your content updated with fresh data is valuable - it will help you to rank for relevant keywords over the long-term as Google rewards fresh content, especially for the type of keywords a data-led campaign will be looking to rank for.

For example, this campaign (even seven years after it’s original launch) is ranking top three positions in the UK for keywords like “cost of living comparison uk” (70 MSV), “cost of living uk cities” (60 MSV), and “cost of living by city uk” (30 MSV). Although not huge search volumes, they’ll be driving relevant traffic that a finance site might be able to convert. If the data was the same as it was when first launched in 2018, I highly doubt the page would still have such strong organic visibility as it does today.

5️⃣ The UK Drug and Alcohol Use Survey 2021 by Delamere

📊 23 RDs, 12 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is a survey campaign produced in 2021 by Delamere, a private rehab clinic. Surveys can be expensive, but when utilised effectively they can produce really great results that go beyond just earning backlinks. When they’re on relevant topics, surveys can be super assets for strengthening a brand’s topical authority around their key topics that they want to improve rankings for, and be associated with by their target audience.

As surveys can be expensive to produce, choosing the right questions to ask is critical. For me, the best surveys are ones that reveal audience insights that no other data sources are currently covering, and also have a strong likelihood of creating stats which illicit those strong emotions that we’ve talked about with the previous campaign examples in this issue.

Some of the survey questions like the cities with the highest drug use I’m pretty sure are available via ONS datasets with much more reliable data than what you’ll get from a 2,000 person survey. The much better examples of survey questions for me are the questions asking people how concerned they are about substance use that really dig into people’s psychology rather than just revealing a factual figure with less emotion attached to it.

Following on from the point discussed in the previous campaign above, this is another example of the extra results that can be earned from keeping successful campaigns alive. This report was done in 2021, and then repeated again in 2022, earning links on a further 27 referring domains the following year, including publications such as The Sun, Evening Standard, and Indy100. If a format lends itself to an annual update, make sure you’re taking advantage of it. Campaigns that do well are difficult to execute, so when you have a hit campaign, get everything you can out of it!

And that’s a wrap for Issue 44. 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 🙂