THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 61

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 61 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.

Cision: The Complete Guide to PR Campaigns: How to Plan, Launch, and Sustain Success

Aira: The State of Digital PR in the Travel Industry 2026

Bottle: Why You Shouldn't Trust Anyone Promising "Guaranteed" AI Visibility (And What Actually Works)

Reboot: How to land high-quality Australian links

Studiohawk: How Digital PR Helps Improve Keyword Rankings

Connective3: How to build a Digital PR strategy for your brand

Connective3: A guide to Digital PR in Spain

Motive PR: Six tips for growing your brand’s online presence

Cedarwood Digital: How to integrate thought leadership into your PR strategy

Press Gazette: Future leverages high visibility on ChatGPT by offering GEO as a service

Ahrefs: 7 Steps for Tracking Your ChatGPT Visibility With Ahrefs

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

1️⃣ AI visibility is difficult to track, on top of the search results that people get being extremely inconsistent. Microsoft and Bing have made measuring AI visibility a tad easier in the past week. Microsoft last week launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools. AI Performance lets you see where, and how often, your content is cited in AI-generated answers across Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries, and select partner integrations, with insights including total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries, page-level citation activity, and visibility trends over time.

2️⃣ If you’re thinking about publishing a blog post ranking your own brand as the top option to improve your visibility in AI results when customers search for recommendations, consider these three things.

1) Yes it might work right now but it won’t work forever. Is it worth the risk of future penalties?

2) Don’t forget about SEO. If you’re using this tactic at scale how will it also impact SEO visibility (especially since these types of posts are technically against Google’s guidelines).

3) What will your customers that read it think? Content should ultimately be created for users not exclusively for search engines. Is it worth the the potential negative impact on customer perceptions for your brand?

3️⃣ How to quickly pick the day, date, month, or year from dates in Excel/Sheets (great for finding trends in dates for PR campaigns!)

For dates/days:

=TEXT(A1, "d") - gives you the date of the month as a single digit number, e.g. 4

=TEXT(A1, "dd") - gives you the date of the month as a double digit number, e.g. 04

=TEXT(A1, "ddd") - gives you the day of the month as abbreviated text, e.g. Mon

=TEXT(A1, "dddd") - gives you the day of the month as the full text, e.g. Monday

4️⃣ And for months:

=TEXT(A1, "m") - gives you the month as a single digit number, e.g. 2

=TEXT(A1, "mm") - gives you the month as a double digit number, e.g. 02

=TEXT(A1, "mmm") - gives you the month as abbreviated text, e.g. Feb

=TEXT(A1, "mmmm") - gives you the month as the full text, e.g. February

5️⃣ And finally, to pull the year from a date:

=TEXT(A1, "yy") - gives you the year as a double digit number, e.g. 26

=TEXT(A1, "yyy") - gives you the year as the full number, e.g. 2026

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 U.S. Census: Housing Vacancies and Homeownership

The U.S. Census is a great source for data on housing vacancies and home ownership in America that are regularly updated with insights into how many homes are vacant. Data tables are available at a national and regional level, but the real interesting ones that we’re likely to be looking for are the figures broken down by state and metro areas which you can find here. The datasets date back to 2005 and could be great for identifying the areas with the highest vacancy rates, and where the rates are growing/declining the most.

2️⃣ ONS Retail Sales Index

Each month ONS releases this amazing dataset with the value of retail sales in the UK, split by different sectors, including but not limited to food stores, fuel, alcohol and tobacco, clothing, furniture, sports equipment, and second-hand goods. The data goes all the way back to 1988 and is available in lots of different formats such as seasonally adjusted figures, and split by small vs large businesses. There’s so many great data points in these reports, not just for your own data-led campaigns but also for spotting trends in relevant retail sectors that you can use as the context for expert commentary stories.

3️⃣ BookRetreats.com

BookRetreats is a directory site specifically for wellness retreats. While sites like TripAdvisor and Expedia are great for finding lists of attractions and places to stay, I find that using more niche directory sites like this can often produce better results if you’re looking for something more specific such a yoga retreats. The search results also have some great filters to make your results more specific to the story you’re trying to create, for example, different yoga styles, if the retreats are gender specific or family friendly, the skill level required, food options such as vegan, and if the retreat is close to different nature landmarks. The site has listings in countries around the world too which makes it a great source for ranking cities/countries in an index campaign.

4️⃣ Camping USA - U.S. Campgrounds by State

Speaking of niche directory sites, here’s another one. Camping USA is a directory of different campgrounds across America which you can search for by state. It’s not the most user-friendly site but works well for finding which places have the most camping sites in the U.S.

5️⃣ McDonalds Corporate Financial Information

Sometimes the most interesting data stories come from data sources you don’t think of using. I recently saw a really cool story using data from McDonalds’ corporate reports which made me realise just how much data big companies like this share in their corporate reports, especially useful if they’re a multi-national organisation. For example, McDonalds lists the number of restaurants that they have in each country with YoY comparisons. This is a good example of data that you could spend ages collecting via sources like Google Maps or TripAdvisor, but could actually be listed in a company’s corporate site and ready to copy and paste in seconds rather than spending hours/days scraping directory sites.

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 Ranking the Safest Place to Travel by BHTP

📊 444 RDs, 161 DR 50+

The safest countries in the world to travel to is an excellent example of an index campaign that produces significantly better results when you revisit and update it each year. This campaign by Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection has been running since 2018, with the most recent ranking coming last October. The ranking combines original survey data with secondary sources such as Numbeo and GeoSure to create the ranking of the safest countries to travel to.

At first I thought the inclusion of their own survey data in addition to a source like Numbeo which is based on user sourced data seemed a tad unnecessary, but they’ve actually used the demo data from their own surveys in a very clever way to create different variations of the index. For example, they created unique safety indexes specifically based on the responses from different age and income groups, while also asking respondents about different types of safety, so they can also filter the results by the safest cities from violent crime and the safest cities for people of colour to visit.

Another thing that I like with this campaign that again plays into the many benefits to be gained from campaigns that you can update each year, is that they’ve really leaned into the trends across the ranking for each year in their analysis, creating a Hall of Fame list for countries that have ranked in their top 10 for each year they’ve conducted their study. Looking back at the earlier versions of the campaign, they’ve also made tweaks along the way to their methodology for the ranking which I like too.

Ahrefs only shows backlinks coming in to the current landing page since 2023 so I’m guessing it was on a different url previously before being redirected, but as a guide, the current url has earned 198 referring domains in the past two years, almost half of the total referring domains it currently has, proving how campaigns like this often start earning even stronger results each year. This is likely due to Journalists becoming more familiar with the index and the brand, and trust in them as a voice of authority on the topic of safest countries to visit grows each year. This is also the case with their target audience who as they see the same campaign covered in the news each year will have stronger and stronger brand awareness and trust each year.

The page also ranks for over 460 keywords and earns 7,000 organic sessions a month, another key performance metric that grows in even greater volumes each year that they update the study.

2️⃣ Lottery Fraud by State: The States Most Affected by Vegas Insider

📊 16 RDs, 11 DR 50+

Coming up with campaign ideas for gambling brands that people will see and go “yeah that’s super relevant and on brand for a gambling client” is difficult. People love to criticise PRs for producing campaigns for gambling brands that lack relevance, and while there’s definitely some very clearly bad examples that most of us have probably seen, I think a lot of people are a bit too quick to say campaigns lack relevance by only looking at relevance at a topical relevance level. But that’s another topic for another time. The point I’ll eventually get to is that I think this works really well as an example of a campaign by a gambling brand that does do a great job of smashing the topical relevance element of a great campaign idea.

Here, Vegas Insider have analysed FTC lottery and sweepstakes scams data by state to reveal where in the U.S. is most impacted by gambling fraud. To rank the states they’ve created a victim score out of 100 based on a combination of the number of reports per million people and the total losses per capita. I like how they’ve weighted both data points by per capita while also combining them to create their own third metric, giving them three unique rankings to create stories from. I also like from a data point of view that they’ve analysed over five years worth of reports rather than just the last 12 months to produce more reliable results based on a stronger sample size.

The campaign only launched in October 2025 but already has links to the campaign page from 16 sites, including a nice selection of regional news sites across Dallas, Alabama, Ohio, and Florida (possibly more including non-linked coverage and coverage that links to different urls which are important to remember when analysing how many links a campaign has earned using a backlink tool as you’re really only analysing the campaign page not the whole campaign).

3️⃣ Feeld Raw 2025 by Feeld

📊 40 RDs, 17 DR 50+

Internal data is the secret weapon for creating newsworthy PR stories for so many brands, and this is a great example of how customer data can be used to tell engaging stories. Feeld is a , quote, “dating pp for the curious”, and their 2025 deep dive report into user data focuses on topics such as fluid sexuality, pegging, and role play. This isn’t your Tinder wrapped kinda report basically.

The great part about creating stories using internal data is that it creates stories that are going to be most relevant to your highest value audience, your actual target audience that are going to be interested in these topics, see your story, and fingers crossed hopefully some of them actually become customers off the back of it.

That process from seeing a story in the news from a brand to becoming a customer is usually a long one that requires multiple impressions before people actually take any action, but internal data campaigns are a super way of potentially skipping a couple of steps in that lengthy process, perfect for being able to show your clients and key stakeholders the value of your PR activity in a way they truly understand - web traffic and commercial metrics!

This is the second year of the Feeld Raw report, earning coverage on sites such as Daily Mail, Vince, Mashable, TimeOut, and Dazed. And the headlines they are earning from these stories are perfect for a brand like this - “The rise of 'heteroflexible': The fastest growing sexuality in the UK according to experts”, “NYC Has the Fastest-Growing Bisexual Population in the World”, and this double header from Dazed, first in 2024, “It looks like Charli xcx influenced Gen Z's kinks this year”, and then in 2025, “More and more men want to be pegged, according to Feeld”.

4️⃣ The Top Mosquito Cities by Orkin

📊 109 RDs, 23 DR 50+

Orkin are a great example of a brand that understand the power of internal data for earning PR coverage, and make the absolute most of it. As a pest control company, they might fall into the bracket with some of being too boring of a brand to do creative data-led campaigns with. Well they are great proof of a brand that find clever ways to make pests newsworthy in creative ways.

This is one of the more recent campaigns that they’ve launched which reveals the top mosquito hotspots in America based on their internal data of mosquito treatments they’ve received in each city over the past year. The page has links from 100 sites including TimeOut, Travel + Leisure, Marta Stewart, Mental Floss, and Secret NYC.

This campaign isn’t a one off either for Orkin. They have 10 other similar campaigns with over 100 referring domains. The 2023 mosquito cities list earned links from 132 referring domains, and the 2024 list landed on 77 linking sites. They also do the same campaign using their own internal data for rats and bed bugs. 5 of these campaigns also earned over 300 referring domains.

And it’s not just backlinks that are the measure of success for campaigns like these. Because they are so on brand, they are also worth their weight in gold in establishing topical relevance and authority, and impacting brand perceptions. Most of the time in Digital PR our go to reference of success are SEO based metrics like the ones mentioned above.

But don’t forget about how campaigns we produce can be impacting how customers feel about a brand. These campaigns by Orkin earn huge volumes of coverage year after year. That gets their brand in front of national audiences, with the benefit paying off when people need the services of a pest company, do their online research to find pest control companies, and in amongst all the options they have there’s this one company whose name they immediately recognise because of all that news coverage they’ve seen. PR is a long-term game, and Orkin are a great example of how even brands in an unusual niche can earn regular top tier media coverage at scale if their campaigns are creative enough.

5️⃣ Emoji Kitchen by emoji.supply

📊 2,583 RDs, 56 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is another from the “cool shit gets links” category. Emoji Kitchen is a fun tool that lets you combine two emojis together. Two things for me here that I think PRs can learn from. The first being that fun projects like this can be great link building assets if they’re relevant for the right brand and fit the tone that they’re going for. Although many of the linking domains are lower quality, over 8,600 backlinks from more than 2,500 sites are still huge numbers. And 219,000 monthly organic sessions isn’t nothing to be sniffed at (the page was regularly above 500,000 for a near two year period until it dropped in the past year).

The second being that this is a good case study of how two brands can have successful link building assets for very similar ideas, or in this case, pretty much identical projects. Emoji Kitchen isn’t unique to emoji.supply, there’s multiple other ones. This one for example which ranks first for me for “emoji kitchen” has over 10,000 backlinks from 3,000+ domains, and ranks for over 2,000 global keywords that drive nearly 600,000 organic sessions a month (1.9 million a month at its peak). Competition is relative and ranking for some searches won’t be a realistic short-medium term goal, but let this be proof that multiple domains can get huge results from the exact same idea.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 61. 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 🙂