THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 64

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 64 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 Lora Thornton, Head of PR at Flaunt Digital - Why Campaign-Led PR Is the Strategic Choice

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

Distinctly: Digital PR Study: How can we influence brand visibility in AI search?

Studiohawk: Best Digital PR Campaigns: 50+ Amazing Examples

PRmoment: PRs reveal how non-PR degrees set them up perfectly for public relations

Wolfenden: The difference between coverage and authority in digital PR

Flaunt Digital: Why PR and Paid Media Work Better Together

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

Moz: Digital PR Strategy in 3 Simple Steps — Whiteboard Friday

Gajendra Singh Rathore on LinkedIn: Only 3% of PR Pitches Get a Response. The Other 97% Failed Before the Journalist Even Opened the Email.

Jack Jolly on LinkedIn: The "Pub Test" isn't enough. You need the "Pub Debate."

Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Founder visibility is something I think a lot of business owners underestimate, especially when they’re focused on growing the brand itself.

Elise Hopkins on LinkedIn: Everyone knows about Pinterest Trends. But the next place I’m watching for cultural signals? Etsy Trends.

Sophie Rhone on LinkedIn: 10 Data Formats That Turn Boring Data Into Digital PR Stories

PRmoment: Wages for women in PR are ‘lagging behind’, data finds

Press Gazette: At least 59 English language news publishers now have 100k+ online subs

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Build Insanely Creative Digital PR Campaigns with Katy Powell

PR in the Real World Podcast: Shaping the News for Millions - Inside Reach plc with Chief Content Officer David Higgerson

What’s Got The World Talking Podcast: PR and Regional Media: What Works Now

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

1️⃣ If you've landed coverage on a site that has comments enabled, read the comments left on your news story. For starters they're usually a great source of entertainment, but they can also provide valuable insight into how your story is connecting with the publication's readers. Journalists will definitely be taking note of the volume and type of comments their articles get as engagement metrics are key KPIs for news publications. If your story (or stories you're researching) is getting a lot of engagement in the comments section, it's probably a good signal that similar stories might also be of interest.

2️⃣ When you start working with a new brand try and find out as much information as you can about the founder of the company. If they have an interesting background, journey, etc that can make for a great PR story that you can use to get coverage reasonably quickly into working with a new client. These are often also stories that the person in charge of your budget will really love which is a great way to get them on side early on too.

3️⃣ Responding to comments made by influential people in your industry that your brand has an opposing stance on can be a great way of earning quick coverage. It's a topic that you know is already being covered in the news, and these types of stories can be a great way of pushing the personality of your brand in the media, especially if you want to position the brand with a bit of a cheeky, pushy, edgy, etc vibe.

4️⃣ Speaking of personality, in 2026 your personality is becoming an ever stronger source of added value to your pitches. So many people are using AI to write their pitches and press releases now, and the downside of that is that they all read the same. Unless you've trained your AI tool to write in a tone of voice that has a specific personality to it, pitches and press releases created by AI with no human editing stand out like a sore thumb to Journalists. Don't be afraid to show a bit of personality in your pitches. It shows you’re human and that is becoming more and more valuable to Journalists these days.

5️⃣ Not all sections of a publication cover stories and write their headlines in the same way. For example, if you want to research how Metro writes their headlines for a sports story, you'd be better using site:metro.co.uk/sport as a Google search rather than the whole domain.

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 Rough Sleeping in England

I know Excel datasets that you have to create filters and pivot tables on yourself aren’t for everybody. Quite a lot of UK Gov datasets also have interactive dashboards like this one covering data on rough sleeping in England. These dashboards are a lot more user friendly and ideal for getting a quick and easy snapshot of potential stories you could create from the data. These stats go back to 2010 and cover every local authority in England.

2️⃣ Monthly Visits to UK Museums

This is a really interesting dataset that covers the number of visitors to DCMS sponsored museums and galleries in the UK (excluding corporate events). The datasets covers the number of visitors per month and per quarter to 34 different museums including the British Museum and the various Imperial War Museums across the UK, with data going all the way back to April 2004.

3️⃣ Personal Safety on Public Transport in Great Britain

These stats are based on a survey of 4,900 adults in Great Britain and cover how safe people feel getting to, waiting for and travelling on the transport network, experiences of anti-social behaviour, violence, verbal abuse, theft, sexual harassment and unwanted behaviours whilst travelling, and how perceptions and experiences of safety vary by time of day, journey stage and transport mode. There’s lots of great (and alarming) stats in here that could be great starting points for campaign ideas or to create expert commentary around.

4️⃣ McKinsey Global Balance Sheet Report

This is an interesting report that McKinsey published in October that analyses the financial balance of nations, creating a global balance sheet of the world’s assets and liabilities. It’s a big report with a lot of complex data on the financial wealth across major economies but could be a great resource for financial brands for example.

5️⃣ Tennis Player Actions Dataset

This is a bit of a unique one but I thought it was a cool example of some of the more niche data sources you can find on Kaggle beyond your traditional csv file datasets. This one is a folder of 500 images and JSON files capturing the four main actions of a Tennis player on court - backhand, forehand, serve, and awaiting return. This one is probably more for a really nerdy detailed analysis of Tennis actions than what a typical PR campaign would look like, but I thought it was a good example to share to help people understand the different types of datasets you can find on Kaggle.

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 Most Popular Cars in America by Edmunds

📊 385 RDs, 135 DR 50+

This campaign by Edmunds is a really clever use of internal data. They’ve used their internal data on new car registrations during 2025 to reveal the most popular car models in each state of America. This is a great example of how valuable internal data can be for brands to create PR stories that can create great headlines such as “the most popular cars in America”. They’ve also done a great job with the landing page by allowing users to click on the interactive map to reveal the top 5 selling cars in each state.

Not only does the campaign have over 1,000 backlinks from nearly 400 sites, the page also receives over 8,000 organic sessions a month. These results didn’t happen a few months after launching however. Although the current data is for car registrations in 2025, Edmunds have actually been doing this campaign since 2020. One year after first launching the page had links from 68 referring domains. Pretty good! Three years in - 265, and now in 2026 it’s up to 385 and ranks on page one for keywords like “popular cars” (5,500 MSV - Pos. 9 in U.S) and “what is the most popular car” (770 MSV - Pos. 1 in U.S).

Internal data campaigns can be worth their weight in gold when used in a creative way to create an engaging PR story, but where they really start producing amazing results like this is when you update 👏 your 👏 data 👏 each 👏 year 👏 to 👏 create 👏 a 👏 new 👏 campaign.

2️⃣ The most loved Airbnbs on social in 2025 by Airbnb

📊 22 RDs, 9 DR 50+

Another great example of a campaign using internal data here from Airbnb who in January revealed which Airbnbs were the most loved on social media in 2025. Airbnb are the masters of creating PR stories where the story centres very heavily around the brand and their product, while still maintaining a high degree of relevance and interest to their audience.

This campaign is a little different from their usual format of tying in Airbnb stays with pop culture events such as new movie releases. Here, they’ve analysed engagement metrics on TikTok and Instagram for posts of Airbnbs around the world to reveal which are the most loved listings of 2025.

A nice and simple data study but one that works really well for positioning their product at the core of the story, and creating headlines such as “Step inside the lone Australian property on Airbnb's most-loved list” and “This cosy NSW cabin is among the world’s 10 most-loved Airbnbs”, which are basically promotions for some of their most popular Airbnbs.

3️⃣ The best cities to raise a family by Compare the Market AU

📊 46 RDs, 26 DR 50+

This next campaign from Compare the Market AU is a classic index campaign ranking the best cities around the world to raise a family in. This is another campaign that is evidence of how you can earn high quality links every year with the same campaign idea.

Their index was originally launched in late 2023. Two years later the page had 7 referring domains. Now with an update for 2026 the page has quickly risen to 46 referring domains, with the 2026 index earning new links on sites such as TimeOut, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age. Interestingly, TimeOut covered the campaign across three different urls in the Melbourne, Sydney, and News folders of their site. This is a good example of how just because a travel site like TimeOut has covered your campaign in one regional area of the site doesn’t mean it can’t be covered again with a different region.

From an SEO point of view they’ve been clever by putting the campaign page url in the home loans folder of the site which will help to put more of the link value the page earns into the home loans page, which I imagine is a key page that they want to improve rankings for. The downside of doing this is that it’s very easy for your campaign page to become an orphan page. This basically means a page with no internal links coming into the page (or isn’t in a parent folder, hence the term orphan page - bit depressing when you really think about it like that).

If you do create campaign pages in a url structure like this try to include some internal links from other pages on your site as this will help Google and other search engines to crawl the page, otherwise it might exist on your site but not get discovered by search engines to display to users (a load of external links of course will help too!).

4️⃣ McDonald’s Price Index 2025: The Most Affordable Places for a Big Mac by CashNetUSA

📊 136 RDs, 58 DR 50+

CashNetUSA do a lot of very cool data-led stories and if you have a finance or consumer spending brand then I highly recommend doing it a bit of research of the different campaigns they’ve launched over the years which are fantastic starting points for triggering some creative ideas of your own. This campaign compares the average price of a McDonalds Big Mac in every state of America and across major cities.

Big Mac’s costing more in states like New York and California probably isn’t super surprising so I love what they’ve done with their data analysis by comparing the price of a large Big Mac meal as a percentage of the median hourly wage in each state. Not only does this give the reader better and more useful data, but it also gives you another top 10 to use for stories with the 10 most and least affordable states. For example, the most expensive Big Mac is in Massachusetts, but Massachusetts actually ranks third for most affordable state when weighted against the median hourly wage in the state.

The graphics on the page are absolutely stunning and super user friendly which I love. The campaign earned links from sites such as CBS News, TimeOut, Mental Floss, and in multiple stories on Daily Mail.

5️⃣ WindowSwap

📊 3,486 RDs, 544 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is another “cool shit gets links” entry that I feel like brands can take more advantage of to earn links at scale. WindowSwap is a cool site where people can upload pictures or videos from their window to their site, and users then use the site to travel to a random person’s window anywhere in the world and experience the view from their window.

It’s interesting how a site like this built purely on user generated content gets built from the ground up, but that’s one area where brands with existing audiences have an advantage making it easier to create cool little sites like this.

The site is a link building machine too with over 17,500 backlinks since 2020 on nearly 3,500 sites. The site was launched during lockdown which obviously helped to make it topical at the time, but it continues to earn a high volume of links with over 1,000 new referring domains earned in the past year, and regularly driving 3,000+ organic sessions a month since 2022.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 64. 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 🙂