THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 56

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 56 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.

The Latest on Digital PR Tips

There’s been quite a few new posts on Digital PR Tips since the last newsletter. Here’s what you might have missed:

Digital PRs Share Their Favourite Campaigns From 2025

Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From December

Servicing Blue-Chip Brands: What 7 Years in a Media Agency Has Taught Me

The Best Newsletters in 2026 to Subscribe to if You Work in Digital PR

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.

Get Featured: Press Deadlines: The 2026 Guide

Off The Record: How PRs Can Package Press Releases That Work for Newsroom Social Media Teams

Bottle: What Are the Big Digital PR Themes for 2026?

Siege Media: Reddit vs. Search Engines vs. AI: The 2026 Trust Report

Energy PR: 2026 Marketing Calendar

Cedarwood Digital: 5 Chrome extensions every Digital PR team needs

Cedarwood Digital: How to balance creativity and linkability

Press Gazette: Named: 50 ‘experts’ and linked brands publishers should treat with caution

Press Gazette: Global publisher Google traffic dropped by a third in 2025

Press Gazette: More than 3,000 journalism job cuts tracked in UK and US in 2025

Propellernet: The Digital PR Recap: Q4 2025

Famous Campaigns: 25 of the best creative product drops of 2025

PRmoment: The Stunt Watch review of the year 2025

PRmoment: What did PR care about the most in 2025?

PRmoment: The Good and Bad PR year in review 2025

Press Gazette: Senior news leaders reflect on 2025 and what’s ahead in 2026 – via emojis

Press Gazette: Manchester Evening News editor ‘fed up of playing algorithmic games’

Exploding Topics: 9 Experts Explain How Digital PR Can Improve Your SEO and GEO in 2026

Search Engine Land: How to build search visibility before demand exists

Search Engine Land: Top 10 SEO news stories of 2025

Search with Candour Podcast: The secrets to earning great HARO links w/ Greg Heilers

PRmoment Webinar: The Newsroom Revolution: The content demands of newsrooms have changed. Has PR been slow to mirror these changes?

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

1️⃣ If you find that your copy is full of percentages, or that they're not making your stats sound very impressive, find a different way of presenting them. For instance, to a lot of people one in five sounds bigger than 20%. JBH have created a great calculator for just this - https://jbh.co.uk/pr-percentage-fraction-calculator/

2️⃣ If you're looking to do a survey campaign, check that the insights you're looking for are already available. YouGov and Statista do a lot of surveys that you could use as part of your story rather than paying for a similar survey yourself.

3️⃣ Not every awareness day is worthy of creating a PR campaign around, but they can be a great way of making your story more topical and convincing a Journalist of why your campaign is relevant right now. https://www.daysoftheyear.com/ is a great site for tracking all of the different days of the year events and when they happen.

4️⃣ Key national events are important dates to be aware of even if you’re not planning on creating campaigns around the specific event. Depending on the scale of them and the publication you’re pitching to, they may be dominating the news agenda on that day, and take priority over the campaign you’re pitching. Having these dates on your calendar is a good way of spotting days to avoid pitching certain stories on. There’s a good calendar of not just UK national holidays but observance days too here - https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/uk/2026

5️⃣ And here’s the equivalent list for the U.S. - https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/2026. I like how detailed these calendars are and how they cover observance days for specific states which can be very useful for pitching stories to regional news sites.

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 Salary Inflation Calculator

As a new year begins many of us will be reviewing our salary - this tool is great for measuring if your salary is keeping up with inflation, or of course to use in campaigns on business/finance topics. You just enter your current salary and it tells you how much of a pay increase you would need to keep up with the current rate of inflation. It's actually quite alarming to see how much of an increase you would need to have the equivalent spending power. The tool will also show you how much of a pay increase you would get if your pay increased in line with the current average pay growth. It does say to use your current salary but I think it works better to use your salary from a year ago for a lot of uses.

2️⃣ U.S. CPI Inflation Calculator

This is a similar tool to the above one but for the United States. The Bureau of Labour Statistics tool works a bit different in that it shows you what your salary in a given previous month/year would be the equivalent buying power of in today's economic climate. Great for your own personal use and also comparing the real money value vs price increases of different products using historical prices for example.

3️⃣ U.S. Family Budget Calculator

This is a great tool from the Economic Policy Institute that measures the income a family needs in order to attain a modest yet adequate standard of living. You just enter into the tool where you live and how many adults and children are in your family and it gives you the estimated monthly costs for housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, taxes, and other expenses. A fantastic calculator that could have some many great uses for campaigns, especially as it gives you different figures depending on your state, country, or metro area.

4️⃣ SOI Tax Stats - Gross Collections by Type of Tax and State

This dataset which dates all the way back to 1998 details how much tax each state collects each year. As well as the total figures, it’s also broken down by tax groups such as income tax, employment tax, and estate tax. A great dataset for comparing tax figures across different states, and how they have changed over the last 26 years.

5️⃣ VGChartz

VGChartz is a database of over 66,000 video games with sales and ratings data for not all but most major games. As well as individual titles, you can also search for games by specific consoles and publishers, and see sales for specific regions such as Japan and North America.

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 Average driving speeds around the world by MoneySuperMarket

📊 39 RDs, 15 DR 50+

I’ll be honest, I don’t see too many campaigns with a data methodology that makes me go “oh wow that’s bloody cool”, but this is definitely one of them. Here, MoneySuperMarket have revealed the average long-distance driving speeds around the world in a very clever way.

To do so they’ve used the Google Routes API to research how long it takes drivers to drive a long-distance route between two major cities, then using the distance and travel time to calculate the average driving speed. Sample sizes are always important in any data campaign and I love how they’ve collected data for different times of the day and different days of the week to account for traffic congestion and ensure the data they’re sharing with the world is accurate and reliable.

Campaigns like this where data can be collected for each country are great for hero campaigns due to the scope of the data you can collect, and more data means more angles. As well as comparing worldwide, you can also break the data down by continent to create more headlines that rank a different country as the best or worst. They also allow you to easily replicate your methodology comparing cities, states, etc, rather than country to country as this campaign has done going the extra mile (no pun intended) to also reveal the average driving speeds in regions of the UK and states in America.

If you only have limited budget you don’t have to cover all of these angles straight away. You can always just cover your main angle and then if that data is a hit and gets some great coverage, revisit the data collection and expand the scope to cover more areas and create new angles with the confidence that there’s media and audience interest in the topic, and the knowledge of what worked or could be improved this time around.

2️⃣ The Easiest & Hardest Countries to Learn to Drive by Zutobi

📊 73 RDs, 37 DR 50+

This next campaign comes from Zutobi who in 2023 revealed which countries are the easiest and hardest to learn to drive in. As is the case with many campaign ideas, there’s multiple ways of producing the same idea, especially with data campaigns. I like their approach to this campaign by not just looking at an individual metric or ones that are easy to quantify such as the total cost of lessons or the number of hours of lessons. Here, they’ve created an index that also looks at yes or no factors such as if a theory test or an eye test for example is required to get a licence.

As well as being a well produced data campaign, they’ve also created a really nice landing page for the campaign that does a great job of quickly explaining the key points of the data, along with some nice looking graphics. I know not everyone agrees with this but for me every data campaign should have a landing page for a number of reasons. One of the biggest benefits is the ability for those pages to drive their own organic traffic.

This takes time to grow but can be a really impactful benefit to show to your clients/managers that is far closer linked to commercial metrics than just the number of links built. This page ranks position 1 in the UK for “hardest driving test in the world” (300 MSV), as well as a bunch of related terms with smaller search volumes (which you should always look at when determining the search interest of a topic rather than just at an individual search term, especially when you’re looking at long-tail searches).

3️⃣ Sun Damage Calculator by Harley Street Skin

📊 10 RDs, 4 DR 50+

I love a good calculator campaign! It’s a shame we don’t see more of them in the Digital PR space these days. This one by Harley Street Skin is a questionnaire which then takes your answers and tells you how much the sun may have aged your skin based on factors such as where you live, skin colour, how many holidays you have, and what SPF you use.

Tools like this are most effective when they’re not being relied to be the entire story. This campaign does a great job of building on the tool and using it to set the context for the expert advice from the brand on how to better protect your skin from sun damage. This helps to take your content from a cool piece of content that people might use, to one that starts to have more of an impact from a brand point of view, while also giving your campaign extra angles to outreach if the tool itself isn’t as popular as you hoped.

4️⃣ Safest Cities in America by NeighborhoodScout

📊 226 RDs, 87 DR 50+

If there’s one campaign format that I love more than a great data study, it’s a great data study that brands turn into an annual report. So many of the successful campaigns from previous years that I’m revisiting for this part of the newsletter would be perfect to update again in future years, as they worked so well when they were first done. With clients moving agencies fairly regularly it can be easier said than done but don’t be afraid to pick up another agency’s old campaign and give it new life!

Sadly it seems as though 2023 was the last year that NeighborhoodScout did this campaign but they updated it every year since 2012. I like the relative simplicity of the data collection for this campaign. I’ve seen similar safest places to live campaigns done as big indexes with lots of unique metrics (which are great btw), but this one just looks at the number of property and violent crimes per 1,000 local residents to reveal how likely locals are to become a victim of crime.

I really like how they’ve used cities rather than just states for the data collection which is a great way of giving regional news sites stories that are super tailored to their readers. Many local news sites will find stories about a specific city more appealing than about a state as a whole (states in the U.S. are absolutely huge compared to regions in the UK don’t forget). It means more research but having a larger dataset also allows them to rank the top 100 most dangerous cities, as well as safest cities, giving them so many more angles to create stories from.

A campaign like this does take a lot of time to produce, and more time means more budget and higher risk if it doesn’t work well. But the other side of that coin is bigger datasets mean more angles and a much higher ceiling for potential results. As well as the 3,300 backlinks for this page from 226 sites, there’s another 3,400 links from 690 referring domains for the most dangerous cities page. And it’s not just links that show the success of the campaign. The most dangerous cities was regularly getting 15,000+ organic sessions a month for three years, peaking at 48,000, and the safest cities page was consistently around 3,000 monthly sessions from 2017 to 2023. Since the campaign hasn’t been updated the traffic has dropped off post 2023 as Google probably started ranking 2024 studies ahead of it, but it goes to show 1) the value of on-site content for data campaigns, and 2) the value of keeping your campaigns updated each year on the same url.

5️⃣ U.S. States With the Most Million-Dollar Homes by Visual Capitalist

📊 37 RDs, 2 DR 50+

Visual Capitalist is one of my favourite campaign inspo sources, in particular for data stories. Most of their articles are campaigns done by other brands and shared with them, but they also produce their own data studies too that are always of a high quality. This one uses Zillow data to reveal which states in America have the highest number of cities where the average house price is over $1 million.

This is another cool example of taking a different more creative approach than the most obvious one to answering your campaign question. Initially I assumed this would be a map of the states with the most total homes listed at $1 million or higher, or maybe as a percentage of total properties for sale. Which would both be great data stories. But what they’ve done is different and they’ve instead looked at the number of cities where the typical home costs $1 million or more, revealing that there are 218 cities in California alone where this case (again for UK readers, we forget just how big the United States and certain states actually are!).

Visual Capitalist also has a daily newsletter that I very much recommend subscribing too if you enjoy reading data stories and/or are looking to create more data-led campaigns of your own this year!

And that’s a wrap for Issue 56. 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 🙂