THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 51

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 51 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 we had two guest contributions on the Digital PR Tips blog.

The first one comes from Chloe Tickner, Digital PR Manager at Propellernet

The Science of Digital PR: Why Challenging Your Own Work Builds Better Campaigns

And the second one comes from Amelia Evans, Freelance PR Consultant at Amelia India PR

How to get the most out of your Christmas PR campaigns

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.

BuzzStream: 25+ Essential Digital PR Tools For Any Team in 2025

Cision: 7 Steps to Turn PR Metrics Into Meaningful Action

Get Featured: The key way to target journalists (which most media lists overlook)

Motive PR: What is GEO?

Bottle: Top Christmas Marketing Ideas That Didn't Just Slap a Santa Hat on the Logo

Propellernet: Search is Expanding – And It Looks Different

The SEO Works: How To Track ChatGPT Traffic in Google Analytics 4

Ahrefs: AI’s Impact on SEO: 13 Things That Changed, 4 Things That Stayed The Same

Press Gazette: Google promises Discover ‘fix’ as more fake AI stories top rankings

Press Gazette: Publishers offered 50% revenue share in pay-per-article data platform for PRs

Search Engine Journal: Google Discusses Digital PR Impact On AI Recommendations

Google: Introducing Query groups in Search Console Insights

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Master Reactive PR in the US with Madeleine Dykes

Search Lancaster #1: Nov 18 from 6pm to 8pm GMT

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

1️⃣ If you see a data led campaign that you found interesting, check out the methodology section to see where and how they sourced the data and keep a bookmarks folder of any data sources that are of interest. You never know when you might have a use for them later.

2️⃣ Please be super detailed about your methodology on your landing page. It's helpful for readers and Journalists to better understand your content but it's also bloody great for Digital PRs to take note of the data sources used and use it for our own inspiration!

3️⃣ Your data can often be confusing to the average person. Look at other metrics/reference points/historical data that you can compare it to. This will often not only make it easier to understand but often produce a better headline. Explain it to a friend and if they ask something like "is that a lot?" then you need to put it into context.

4️⃣ If you don't know of it already, make sure you're regularly checking in on content produced on The Pudding. One of the best sources of inspiration for creative content.

5️⃣ Sending huge numbers of emails in one go can trigger spam filters. Set a delay time between your emails to space your pitches out and avoid them all being sent at once (BuzzStream is great for this).

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 Average Rent Prices in the U.S.

RentCafe is a great site for finding average rent prices in each state, as well as select cities in America. What I like about this site is that the rent prices are also broken down by the size of the property based on the number of bedrooms, along with the average apartment size. This is great for not just getting the average rent prices but also calculating the average rent per sq ft in each state.

2️⃣ Internet Game Cars Database

IGCD is a comprehensive list of vehicles seen in video games (playable and unplayable), image captures and additional information about them. Quite a niche one but the site has a great statistics section which is perfect for sparking ideas on how you could use this data for content purposes.

3️⃣ Great Britain Driving Test and Theory Test Data

This dataset is perfect for researching the differences in driving and theory test pass rates in England, Scotland, and Wales. The data includes breakdowns by driving test centre and which city/town the centre is in, as well as by gender and age. While the total numbers by gender are updated quarterly, the location and age figures are updated annually.

4️⃣ Northern Ireland Driver & Vehicle Agency Activity Statistics

UK Gov and ONS datasets can be a tad frustrating sometimes if you want to rank cities in the whole of the United Kingdom against each other, as depending on the report, it may not cover all four countries, in particular Northern Ireland if the report covers Great Britain rather than the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom but not Great Britain). In most instances the same dataset will be available for the other nations, just on a different site. This is one example of that where driving test data for Northern Ireland is documented separately to England, Scotland, and Wales. Northern Ireland also make things further complicated by having datasets on lots of different gov domains rather than all in one place, but a quick Google search should usually bring them up once you know what you’re looking for.

5️⃣ Northern Ireland Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings

This is another example. On the ONS site you can find the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings reports for every local authority in England, Scotland, and Wales, but you have to head to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency if you want to complete the data for all of the UK. Fortunately, this is one where the datasets line up perfectly to provide like-for-like data points on the number of hours worked and earnings for full-time and part-time workers in Northern Ireland, grouped by gender and location.

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 Most Used Emoji on Twitter in Every Country by Crossword Solver

📊 139 RDs, 96 DR 50+

This is such a cool campaign that Crossword Solver released in 2022 using Twitter data to reveal the most used emoji in tweets around the world. Using a dataset of 9 million geotagged tweets they analysed the most used emoji in each tweet, and then grouped the data by country based on the geotag of the post, creating some stunning map graphics. Across the board the top emoji was almost unanimously either 😂 or ❤️.

The great thing about working with super methodologies that produce huge datasets like this is you have so many different ways to categorise the data into interesting angles. For example, as well as the maps showing the top emoji in each country, they’ve also created an interactive tool that shows which countries have the highest ratio of specific emojis. A really well executed data campaign that earned links on sites such as Newsweek, PC Mag, and Social Media Today.

2️⃣ The World’s Favourite Sensual Songs by Supplement Place

📊 19 RDs, 12 DR 50+

Spotify playlist campaigns are a format that feel as though they’ve gone a little out of fashion this year, but when done with a creative emotional hook, they can be a very productive format that is relatively quick and simple to produce, and can earn some great coverage. This example from Supplement Place researched the most frequently used songs on Spotify playlists featuring the words, ‘sexy’, ‘sexual’, ‘horny’, ‘erotic’, ‘freaky’, ‘turn on’, and ‘seduction’.

I like how this campaign has made the data work harder for them too. Although the landing page looks a bit messed up now, it doesn’t just stop at the top songs, but also analyses which artists feature the most, which can be a great way to possibly get a different artist in the headlines a Journalist can make from your story.

3️⃣ The Most Seductive Cities Around The World by The Bottle Club

📊 52 RDs, 38 DR 50+

This next one is an index campaign produced by The Bottle Club in 2022 that ranks the world’s most seductive cities. Some of the ranking factors are better than others, but I do like how they’ve been creative with their choices, using metrics such as the number of sex events, the number of porn stars named after the city, and the number of Restaurants that sell Oysters. Tad annoying however that the methodology only names the metrics and not how they were used or where they were sourced from, which is very useful for Journalists that find your campaign and need quick answers relating to your methodology. Give them one less thing that they need to ask about.

By hitting on sexual emotions, they’ve made the campaign super relatable from a storytelling point of view, and the worldwide ranking helped The Bottle Club to earn coverage not just in the UK, but on top news sites in America, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.

What’s also interesting is how the terminology differs in the headlines compared to on the campaign page. On-site, seductive is the main term used for the ranking, but from looking at the coverage headlines, you’ll see that Journalists have chosen to use kinkiest and horniest much more often. Analysing how Journalists write their headlines for either your own campaign that is in progress, or for similar campaigns you’ve used for inspo, is a great way of deciding which choice of words to use in your subject lines.

4️⃣ The Most Popular Grandparent Name in Every State by Coventry Direct

📊 28 RDs, 9 DR 50+

When I first looked at this campaign I assumed it had researched the most common first name for grandparents which I thought was a super creative idea. What they’ve done isn’t quite as creative but it does still produce a cool end result that is the type of story that everyone can relate to and have an emotional reaction to when they see the results for their state. To find out the most common nickname for Grandma and Grandpa, Coventry Direct surveyed over 5,000 Americans asking them what they call their grandparents.

It’s a pretty simple idea but sometimes simple is good if it’s easy for everyone to understand and relate to. The top name for Grandma overall is Nana, with Papa winning the vote for Grandpa. While I do like the graphics, I definitely think that colour coding the map based on the different names would make it a lot easier to differentiate the trends between states rather than just listing a number using the same colour background which makes it look like every state had the same top option.

5️⃣ The Most Popular Takeaway Choices Around The World by MoneyBeach

📊 79 RDs, 44 DR 50+

Nearly all of the campaigns that I share here I think are good campaigns, mostly because they’ve earned a lot of coverage, or I’ve added them to my ideas bank because I thought there was a spark of a good idea there, even if the results didn’t necessarily translate into what the idea maybe deserved. As you can see, this one clearly got great results, not just in terms of quantity but quality too with links on sites such as Daily Mail and Fox News. But I do think it’s a tad flawed from a data point of view (apologies if whoever did this campaign is reading 😬).

A common flaw that I see with search volume campaigns is mistaking search interest with popularity. A lot of the time the two do overlap, but not always. The bigger issue for me here is relating the campaign to how people search. The methodology states “We used Google search data (searching all languages) to establish the average monthly search volume in each country for common search terms associated with ordering a takeaway, such as ‘pizza takeaway’, ‘pizza delivery’ and ‘pizza takeout’.”. Maybe it’s just me but I’ve never once fancied a Pizza and searched for generic Pizza takeaway terms on Google. So I don’t really feel like the methodology used is actually revealing much of anything about which cuisine’s are most popular.

The coverage the campaign earned shows that there’s clearly an appetite (hehe) from Journalists for answers to this topic, and it could be done using data from food delivery apps as one example. Obviously it would take longer to execute, and might limit the map to a city or state level rather than globally, but a lot of the time restrictions like these can actually make idea more robust and an even stronger performer. There’s always more than one way to bake a cake, and finding similar campaigns that you think you can produce with a different execution is a great starting point for sparking creative ideas.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 51. 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 🙂