THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 63

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 63 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

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The latest post on Digital PR Tips comes from Lauren Shelley, Senior Digital PR Executive at Marketing Signals - The rise of the fake expert: How to remain authentic in an inbox of fakes

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

BuzzStream: Should You Use Images When Pitching Journalists? [New Data]

Get Featured: What journalists really think about your pictures

PRmoment: What skills do junior PRs need for success?

Propel: How to Build a Media List in 2026

Influence: The rise of fake experts is undermining trust in media

Andy Barr: How I accidentally invented the UK Digital PR industry

Motive PR: How consumers are using social search in 2026 – and how your brand can benefit

Connective3: Why data-led PR campaigns are the key to EU scaling

Steph Spyro on LinkedIn: If you’re new to comms and the idea of meeting journalists petrifies you, then I have some advice

Gajendra Singh Rathore on LinkedIn: AI Can Do 90% of Your Digital PR Job Now. The 10% It Can’t Is the Only Part That Ever Mattered

Sophie Rhone on LinkedIn: 10 Digital PR Angles That Always Work

Mark Rofe on LinkedIn: Reach PLC released its 2025 results today. I read the report so you don’t have to

Andy Barr on LinkedIn: Which media companies have OpenAI licensing deals

Sophie Rhone on LinkedIn: 10 Digital PR Tips That Actually Win Links

Press Gazette: Staff journalists sacked and misleadingly replaced with AI writers

Sparktoro: New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity

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

1️⃣ The two most important things that impact if your pitch gets opened or not - the subject line and your reputation. If you don’t get your subject line right then it doesn’t really matter how good the rest of your pitch is. And damaging your reputation to the point that certain Journalists see your name and skip your pitch is going to make your job awfully hard.

2️⃣ There are different types of averages, so when you say you took the average of something, it’s good to clarify in your methodology if it’s the mean, median, or mode.

3️⃣ Two newsletters that are great for researching data-led stories on Entertainment topics and studying how they use data analysis to create interesting stories:

1) Stephen Follows - https://stephenfollows.com/

2) Stat Significant - https://www.statsignificant.com/

4️⃣ And speaking of Stephen Follows, this post is a great read to help you understand how outliers can affect your data analysis, and how iMDB’s ratings system works - https://stephenfollows.com/p/how-one-star-and-ten-star-votes-break-imdb

5️⃣ Two Excel formulas that are very useful for data analysis are =TEXTBEFORE and =TEXTAFTER

Essentially what these formulas do is split the text before or after a piece of text

For example, if you have a list of codes that all start with PR and you just want to analyse the second part of the code you could use =TEXTAFTER(A1, "PR")

Or if you have a list of urls and you just want to analyse the page rather than the domain, you could replace PR with the domain to split the domain off from your urls

Or your data might not have a region column but you know that the region is located along with other text that you could split it from using this formula.

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 Top 500 AI Tools 2026

If I’m looking for a dataset then Kaggle is one of the first places that I’m heading to. You can find some real gems on there and this is one of them - a list of the top 500 AI tools by market impact, user sentiment, and technical capability. This could be either a great seed list for analysing AI tools in your own way, or using the data points included in the dataset such as the category, pricing, monthly traffic, user rating, or agentic capability.

2️⃣ Characteristics of International Higher Education Students Studying in the UK

This is a super detailed ONS dataset that was released a couple of weeks ago covering international students migrating to study in the UK. The data covers topics such as the top countries that international students come from, what they study, and the UK regions that they move to.

3️⃣ UK Labour Demand Volumes by Standard Occupation Classification

This next ONS dataset is an ongoing record of the number of online job adverts posted in the UK. The data is updated each month, with the current dataset covering January 2017 to January 2026, and is categorised by local authority district and over 100 different types of roles.

4️⃣ Access to Green and Blue Space in England

This is a great dataset that could be used in many different types of best places to live campaigns. The data covers all local authority districts in England (sadly not the rest of the UK) and lists the percentage of households that are within a 15 minute walk of green and blue spaces, both combined or individually.

5️⃣ Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index 2026

This report by Brand Finance ranks countries based on a nation’s ability to influence others through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion. It’s a huge study based on 150,000 respondents from 100+ markets that rank all 193 members of the United Nations, which makes it great as a ranking factor for global indexes on relevant topics.

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 Which Tech Giants Attract the Most Talent From Competitors? by Switch on Business

📊 95 RDs, 52 DR 50+

This is a really cool data-led campaign by Switch on Business that used LinkedIn jobs history data to analyse the number of employees that have worked at multiple tech giants, creating some beautiful data vis to map out the flow of workers from one tech giant to another.

I referenced LinkedIn as a data source for campaigns in a recent newsletter and this is a fantastic example of the type of insights that you can reveal using data from LinkedIn profiles. As always, the most important aspect of any data study is the storytelling component of it and that is really strong here with the hook of tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Apple helping the story to instantly grab people’s attention.

The data analysis is also fantastic and I love the breakdowns they’ve done of not just which companies have the most and highest percentage of workers who have previously worked at other tech giants, but the way they’ve created these stunning graphics like the one below to map out the volume of employees that have both come from and left for other tech giants. The graphic is a fantastic example of how data vis can be used to quickly showcase not just figures but the scale of your numbers, making it much easier for readers to understand the storytelling aspect of your data than how it would be just listed in a table.

2️⃣ World’s Best Destinations to Boost Your ‘Feel-Good’ Hormones by BookRetreats

📊 122 RDs, 50 DR 50+

Index campaigns ranking the “best destinations…” aren’t particularly unique these days, but they’re popular for a reason - they work, and with enough added creativity to push the story aspect, they can produce fantastic results. This is a great example of a well put together index campaign that was only launched last September, but already has 218 backlinks from 121 referring domains, 50 of which are DR 50+.

BookRetreats analysed the best destinations to boost your ‘feel-good’ hormones, revealing Lisbon to be the top city. BookRetreats is a directory site for wellness retreats so the theme of the index fits really nicely from a relevancy point of view for a brand like this.

The methodology is good too, covering simple to understand but relevant ranking factors such as hours of sunlight, noise and light pollution to measure the quality of sleep people will get, the percentage of restaurants that are healthy options, and the amount of green space per m². They’ve also ranked the cities based on how quickly you can walk between the four most-reviewed attractions, which I really like as an example of creating your own data for a ranking factor rather than just relying exclusively on third party metrics.

If I was to be slightly critical of the methodology, I’d like to see it based on more than 47 cities as it’s ranking the top destinations worldwide. Clearly it doesn’t put Journalists off as the campaign has earned amazing links on sites such as TimeOut, Travel + Leisure, and CN Traveller, but I think 100 should be the seed list size for a campaign like this. I also think it’s valuable for Journalists if you can explain how you’ve chosen the cities you’ve selected for your index, rather than just saying “the index analyzed 47 cities worldwide”. This is where using a seed list of the top 100 best cities to travel to, live in, etc, or based on the two biggest cities per country for example, adds extra clarity to your methodology, and therefore establishes more trust in your data.

3️⃣ The UK Driving Test Report by GoCompare

📊 77 RDs, 51 DR 50+

GoCompare’s UK driving test report is a very well done report that looks as though it gets updated each year. It’s a good example of how a report like this can be done just using secondary data sources. In this case they’ve used DVSA data to reveal the busiest and quietest test centres, which centres have the best and worst pass rates, and what the most common reasons are for failing a test.

The topic obviously fits very naturally with GoCompare’s product as a vehicle insurance comparison site. One of the best benefits of having a strong relevance between your campaign and your products/services is the ease at which you can organically fit internal links onto your landing page. Internal links when used correctly and at a big enough volume can be an extremely impactful influence on pushing your target keywords up the rankings, especially from campaign pages that you’ve done a good job of building external links to.

Over time the campaign page has earned 180 links from 77 sites, which has helped the page to currently be earning an estimated 600+ organic sessions a month, peaking at 1,000+ last year. The page ranks on page 1 for some really high value keywords that their target audience of new drivers are likely to be searching for - #1 for “highest pass rate driving test centre uk” (400 MSV in UK), #1 for “highest driving test pass rate” (90 MSV), and #5 for “uk driving test pass rate” (300 MSV).

4️⃣ America’s Most Vegan-Friendly States by Myprotein

📊 14 RDs, 3 DR 50+

This next campaign launched by Myprotein in late 2020 ranks America’s most vegan-friendly states based on the percentage of takeout options in each state that offer vegan options. This is a fairly straight-forward data-led campaign but the data is strong and it works well as a story.

I’m glad that they ranked the states based on the percentage of vegan options rather than just the total number as that always creates a bias towards your most populated places. Again, the relevance to their core product is strong which makes it easy to fit in a good number of internal links to their key commercial pages.

The images on the page don’t seem to load properly anymore but I like how they’ve also ranked the best vegan takeaway restaurants (fitting as it was launched during Covid era) in each state and the top 10 across America, which helped them to earn a piece of Seattle Magazine covering the extra regional data that was relevant to them.

The campaign also earned links from TimeOut, HuffPost, and The Vegan Review. Not all campaigns need to be massive super creative data ideas. This one in my opinion is fairly simple and wouldn’t take more than a day to collect and analyse the data they’ve used, so not a bad return at all to get some great links like that relative to how long the campaign likely took to put together.

5️⃣ Does online video streaming harm the environment? by SaveOnEnergy

📊 57 RDs, 28 DR 50+

Campaigns that produce headlines that are a bit unusual and unexpected can work really well for earning coverage. They’ll stand out from the pack in a Journalist’s inbox and they’ll be able to publish articles with headlines that capture a reader’s attention and get them to click on their article (a top KPI for Journalists!). This is a good example of that type of campaign from back in 2020 by SaveOnEnergy who analysed the carbon emissions created by watching streaming services.

Comparison points are great for making difficult to understand metrics a lot more relatable, and therefore easier for readers (and Journalists!) to properly comprehend the scale of. For example here, SaveOnEnergy revealed that the 80 million views of Birdbox is the equivalent of driving over 146 million miles.

Now if they just said those 80 million views emitted just above 66 million kg of CO2 I doubt most people would really grasp what that means. 66 million sounds big but most people aren’t experts in CO2 measurements. But by translating it into a figure that the general public will understand much better, miles driven, the new figure of 146 million miles driven suddenly has a much bigger impact with your readers. This bit of data analysis no doubt played a big part in getting the campaign covered on sites such as Forbes, Daily Mail, TechCrunch, and Entrepreneur.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 63. 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 🙂