THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 47

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 47 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.

This week I had the pleasure of publishing the first ever guest contribution to the Digital PR Tips blog. The post comes from Gideon Katz, Digital PR Strategist at Distinctly.

Digital PR in France vs UK: two markets, two approaches

Want to contribute a post of your own to the Digital PR Tips blog? If you have an idea for a topic that you want to write about, please fill in this quick form here.

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

Digital PR Tips: The Best Halloween PR Campaigns (23 Great Examples)

BuzzStream: What To Learn from Analyzing 2k+ YouGov Surveys

Propellernet: The Digital PR Recap: Q3 2025

Motive PR: How brands can use Substack as part of a successful PR strategy

Wolfenden: AI can’t fake experience: Why real experts build real trust

Cision: 2026 PR and Comms Content Planning Calendar

Siege Media: How To Rank in LLMs Using Digital PR

Prosperity Media: How Digital PR Influences LLMs and AI Overviews

Get Featured: When it’s OK to use AI - and when it’s not

Energy PR: Our Favourite AI Tools for Digital PR

Cedarwood Digital: Top 15 Digital PR Statistics We Think You Should Know About

MRS Digital: How to do Digital PR: Expert Strategies in an AI World

Bottle: Reddit SEO: Why Conversations Are Your Brand's Secret Weapon

Press Gazette: Most leading UK news websites fell down Google rankings in 2025

Google: AI Mode is now available in more languages and locations around the world

Growth Memo: What Our AI Mode User Behavior Study Reveals about the Future of Search

The PR Hotline: Why Digital PR Isn’t a Quick Fix and How to Help Clients See the Bigger Picture w/ Gabriella Sheerin

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

1️⃣ Don't neglect the preview text on your outreach emails. This can be just as valuable as your subject line for forming that first impression. Front load it and preview how it will appear in an inbox, not just on desktop vs mobile, but on different size screens - laptop vs monitor, etc

2️⃣ Generally speaking, early morning is the best time to send outreach emails but do not mistake that for being the only time you should send outreach emails. Having a strong subject line and interesting story is more important than the timing of the pitch.

3️⃣ Building a media list for publications outside your country? Try emulating your Google search as if you're searching from that location to find more publications in that market (either change your Google search location settings or search using a VPN).

4️⃣ If you have an index campaign idea and see it's been done before this doesn't mean you can't do it again. Use different data sources/ranking metrics, find new results and new angles, and ideally wait at least 12 months since the last one was published.

5️⃣ Drawing a total blank on ideas? Stop, do something else. Often, the harder you're trying, the harder it is to succeed.

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 Historical Football Results

This site is incredibly valuable if you have a sports client that you’re looking to do Football (Soccer) campaigns for. The site has a historical archive of results from every major league dating back to the 93/94 season in CSV files that are super easy to get stuck into analysing straight away. From 2000/01, the datasets also include more detailed data such as kick off time, the referee for the game, half time score, shots and shots on target, fouls and cards, and also odds data for different markets.

2️⃣ Historical Tennis Results

There’s also a version of the above site for Tennis results. This one isn’t quite as detailed for match stats or the extent of the archive but it’s still super useful for creating data stories around the current generation of Tennis players. You can find datasets for results from the whole year or for specific tournaments, dating back to 2000 for ATP and 2007 for WTA. Datasets also include historical betting odds for each match too.

3️⃣ WatchCount.com

WatchCount.com allows you to find data on historical and live eBay listings. The site includes data for many countries including UK, US, Australia, and Canada, and is a great tool for researching how much items sell for on eBay. The site also has watch count data for all sold items which could be an interesting additional angle too.

4️⃣ Lyrics.com

Song lyrics I think can be a really great data source for some creative campaign ideas. As well as the more obvious music campaigns, song lyrics can also be a clever way of adding a pop culture element to campaigns for clients in more niche industries, for example the vocabulary used by artists in different eras, genres, etc, or by analysing mentions in lyrics of specific keywords relevant to your industry.

5️⃣ Share of urban populations with convenient access to public transport

Our World in Data is a fantastic resource for finding global datasets on a wide range of social topics, making it a great source to scout when finding ranking factors for a global index campaign. This dataset includes the percentage of the urban population in each country that can access a public transport stop within a walking distance of 500 meters (for low-capacity public transport systems) or 1000 meters (for high-capacity public transport systems).

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.

This week there’s five more great examples of creative Halloween themed campaigns. If you missed it, I shared 23 of my favourite Halloween themed PR campaigns here.

1️⃣ Matching Halloween costumes for you and your dog by Boohoo

This is a great example of how fashion brands can use seasonal events such as Halloween to their advantage by putting their brand front and centre of shopping articles during spooky season. In 2021, Boohoo put a creative spin on Halloween costumes by launching matching costume sets so you could pair your look up with your dog.

This is also another really good example of a format that has legs far beyond just one individual campaign. It can be replicated for many different seasonal events, and also repeated with new products in future years. For example, years earlier, Boohoo also launched matching Christmas outfits for you and your dog.

Another slept on benefit of Product PR campaigns like this is that you can directly tie them in with commercial goals since the story is literally promoting sales of your products, on top of the great PR and SEO results you can earn from the coverage. Even if many of the links you get are affiliate links, what you may potentially lose in SEO benefits, you will likely more than make up for in sales from referral traffic, which is a far more impactful metric to be able to report on when showing the value of your PR activity.

2️⃣ Bath & Body Works Halloween Collection by Bath & Body Works

📊 129 RDs, 53 DR 50+

Halloween collections can be a super valuable sales strategy for e-commerce brands in pretty much any industry, that also offers great PR opportunities to get your brand in front of your target audience on relevant high authority publications. Bath & Body Works are a great example of this. Since 2017 they’ve had a Halloween collection of products such as candles and beauty products that has built up a very strong SERP presence off the back of PR activity.

The category page now has 216 backlinks from 129 referring domains such as Good Housekeeping, Bustle, and Well+Good, which goes to show that brands can get non-affiliate links into commercial pages from top news publications. Obviously some of these links will be picked up organically and made easier by the brand equity that Bath & Body Works has, but I’m sure that PR activity promoting the new products every year is a big driving force behind the consistent growth of the page’s backlink profile, which has close to doubled in the last 12 months alone.

Another big advantage of being able to link commercial products and PR activity together in this way is the impact it can have on keyword rankings and organic traffic. According to Ahrefs, the page earns 1,600 organic sessions a month, which is undoubtedly significantly higher during Halloween season. Although many of the keywords are branded searches, the data shows that the number of branded searches are increasing each year, going from a peak of 1,500 in 2019, to a peak of 16,400 last year. The page also has a strong SERP presence for non-branded keywords such as “halloween soap” (1,000 MSV) and “halloween scents” (400 MSV).

3️⃣ The hardest horror villain to escape from by SportsShoes

While purpose-driven PR campaigns are amazing, and can definitely work with Halloween themed ideas, I think Halloween campaigns are a great opportunity for brands to do something a bit different, and more on the fun side of things. Here, SportsShoes have conducted a scientific study to work out which horror villains would be the hardest to escape from.

They did so by calculating each villain’s height, stride length and how many steps they were seen to have taken during the chase. Their research found that Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre apparently ran at over 7 miles an hour, making him the hardest horror movie villain to run away from. I love a well executed data campaign but I also ideas that are a bit camp and tongue in cheek, and this campaign does a great job of hitting that ideal middle ground between the two.

4️⃣ The Most Haunted Universities in the UK by The Knowledge Academy

📊 72 RDs, 52 DR 50+

Finding ways to create a Halloween themed campaign that is relevant to the industry that you’re working in can be challenging, but there’s also no shortage of examples of how a drop of creativity can help to make a Halloween campaign work in practically any industry. This next one is a particularly creative example by The Knowledge Academy, a brand that provides training courses, hardly the most organic link to Halloween.

I would argue however that the more creative links that come from sectors like this actually produce the most interesting campaigns. In 2023, they ranked the most haunted Universities in the UK, with The University of Liverpool coming out on top. The index is based on a number of ranking factors such as how old the University is, the number of nearby cemeteries, and the number of paranormal activity reports within two miles of the University.

The campaign was a big hit with links on relevant sites like The Tab, lots of regional news sites, and this scorcher of a link on The University of Liverpool’s website talking about being ranked as the most haunted University in the UK. Whenever you’re ranking the top places for whatever the idea is, it’s always a good idea to send the story to the place at the top of your ranking. There’s a good chance they may share the story on their socials, or ideally on their website too. Obviously not every example of this will land you with a .ac.uk link, but even lower DR sites that are relevant could be valuable new referring domains to add to your backlink profile.

5️⃣ Nutritionist warns one pumpkin spice drink is worse than three jam doughnuts by Exante

I really like this next expert comment story as an example of how brands can find creative tie ins with Halloween topics. A nutrition expert at Exante analysed 11 seasonal drinks from the high street chains such as Starbucks, Costa, and Pret A Manger, and found they contain more sugar than three Greggs jam doughnuts in one serving.

This is a great way for a brand to position themselves as genuine thought leaders on a relevant topic, while also establishing really strong topical authority and E-E-A-T signals to not just search engines, but their target audience too.

I also love how they’ve used doughnuts as a comparison point rather than just ranking the top drinks by their sugar content. That comparison point makes the story a lot easier for readers to digest and understand the extent of the potential health impact. Also - another expert commentary story with the word warns in the headline 😉

And that’s a wrap for Issue 47. 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 🙂