THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 65

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 65 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 Charlotte Close, PR Strategist at Wagada Digital - Why marketers are moving from website traffic KPIs to focus on brand perception

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

The Comms Stack: Communications Prompt Playbook

BuzzStream: The Role of News Publications in AI Citations [New Data]

BuzzStream: Do AI Data Partnerships with News Platforms Influence Citations?

Off The Record: How AI and Google Traffic Changes Are Reshaping Journalism in 2026

Flaunt Digital: EEAT in the Travel Industry: Creating the Content Holidaymakers Want and Need

PR Newswire: How to Disclose AI Use in Press Releases

Kaizen: Why Reddit is a Goldmine For Human-Led Campaign Thinking

Green Flag Digital: The Best Cybersecurity Digital PR Campaign Ideas in 2026

Lem-uhn: Why Brands Waste Their PR Budget (And How To Fix Your PR Strategy)

Pure Digital PR: The Importance Of Securing Industry-Relevant Interviews For Digital PR

Pure Digital PR: The Power Of Reactive PR

Attention Seeker: Exclusives: Use or Skip?

Gemma Flinders on LinkedIn: Creative Foreplay: Finding Digital PR ideas when you have a brain block

The Drum: How beauty brands are taking experiential marketing to the next level

Press Gazette: Four journalists face redundancy as Pink News moves away from ‘reporter led’ newsroom

Search Engine Land: Why social search visibility is the next evolution of discoverability

Define Media Group: BREAKING! News Thrives in the Age of AI

GSQi: Ask Maps in Google Maps – When Local Search Meets Gemini AI

Search Engine Land: Google confirms AI headline rewrites test in Search results

Google: Google’s response to the CMA’s consultation on potential requirements for Search

The Digital PR Podcast: AI and the Future of Journalism w/ Harriet Meyer

E-coffee with Experts: Why 90% Of Outreach Gets Ignored By Journalists w/ Nicole Franco

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

1️⃣ Don't neglect newsletters for press coverage. Digital PR isn't all about backlinks from news publications with a big DA figure. Many Journalism newsletters have sizeable audiences and can be great for getting your story in front of a specific target audience.

2️⃣ Make sure you include a ranking column in your data tables. It makes them a lot more user friendly and easier for Journalists to pick out where their region ranks for example, especially if your table has more than 10 rows.

3️⃣ In your index tables, try putting the total index score as your first data column rather than the final one. It's the most important data column so making it more prominent sooner in your table can make it easier for readers to spot your top story and key trends.

4️⃣ Eager to find TikTok's relevant to your clients? Rather than trying to incorporate them into your own personal feed, consider creating a second account just for work purposes so that your work feed is nothing but relevant TikTok's. Also good for creating a barrier between work time and personal time.

5️⃣ Use Google Analytics to understand what regions your visitors are from. Then you can create stories targeted at those regions and place a greater emphasis on getting coverage from these 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 Brand Finance Global 500

The 2026 edition of Brand Finance’s Global 500 has recently been released. The report ranks the top 500 brands in the world based on how valuable their brand is. It’s an interesting alternative way of ranking the biggest global companies. The top 500 is all categorised by country and sector, perfect for some data analysis.

2️⃣ Dog-Friendly Beaches in the UK

Dogs on the Beach is a fantastic interactive tool that lists all of the UK’s beaches and details what level of access they have for dogs, whether that be dogs welcome, not welcome, or only allowed on lead or with other restrictions. The tool is very user friendly and you can either use the map or the sidebar to search by region. I also really like how you can use the calendar in the top right corner to get the most relevant information for a specific time of year as some beaches have different restrictions during different dates. That aspect could be great for adding an extra layer of relevance and reliability, for example if you wanted to tie the data into events such as a bank holiday for example.

3️⃣ Most Dangerous and Safest Cities Index

Travel Safe Abroad’s most dangerous and safest cities index is a great resource for ranking how safe major cities are to visit based on factors such as crime levels, healthcare quality, infrastructure reliability, and political stability - ideal for your own index campaigns. There’s also an index for countries which you can find here.

4️⃣ Freedom in the World 2026 Report

The 2026 edition of the Freedom in the World report was released this month with lots of insights into how free different countries are. You can read the report in full from the link above or get all of the freedom index scores for each country from the map here. Another metric that could work well for index campaigns.

5️⃣ Family Benefits Public Spend as a Percentage of GDP

OECD is a great resource for datasets on a wide range of consumer and political topics. This dataset shows which OECD countries have the highest public spend on family benefits as a percentage of the nation’s GDP.

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 Freddo Index by vouchercloud

📊 32 RDs, 17 DR 50+

The Freddo Index feels like something which is a bit of a cultural phenomenon, at least in the UK, so I was pretty surprised to find that the number of backlinks are what they are given how Brits use the Freddo index as a national measure of inflation. Don’t get me wrong though, links from 32 referring domains including sites like The Telegraph, HuffPost, Metro, and The Tab is an amazing return for any campaign.

The campaign also generates its own search demand, with 270 monthly searches from the UK for “freddo index”, 150 for “freddo price index”, and 450 for “freddo price history”. It doesn’t look as though the index has been kept updated since launching in 2017 which is probably part of the reason why the backlink profile hasn’t grown like it could have.

I like how they’ve also included other products such as Mars bars, the cost of a cinema ticket, and Big Mac prices, which again could provide them with a constant stream of new stories to pitch for different products and comparing the relative inflation of each against each other.

(I’m pretty sure this is the original Freddo Index as I couldn’t find another one older than this so maybe Brits just refer to our own knowledge of Freddo prices rather than a single online point of reference for “The Freddo Index”? Someone has also recently purchased thefreddoindex.com but that doesn’t have any sort of backlink profile as of yet.)

2️⃣ Europe’s Top Countries For A Work Life Balance by TotallyMoney

📊 37 RDs, 14 DR 50+

This campaign page is an interesting one as rather than a traditional landing page it’s one long infographic (which should also give you an idea of how old this campaign is). As a graphic it looks amazing but if you want your campaign page to rank for relevant keywords and potentially start bringing in its own source of organic traffic to the site, you want to avoid replicating this. Google will just see it as one big image on the page rather than reading all of the text and data which is a key signal in telling search engines what keywords to rank the page for.

As an infographic it looks pretty amazing and I really like how they’ve visualised the data as a stacked bar chart showing the breakdown of an average 24 hours for a worker in each country. Extending it to also show the number of hours each day that are spent sleeping rather than just work time vs leisure time is a cool touch. The campaign was covered on sites such as Business Insider, Conde Nast Traveler, and House Beautiful.

3️⃣ Books Around America: Uncover the Books Set Nearest to You by Crossword Solver

📊 50 RDs, 17 DR 50+

This next campaign is from Crossword Solver, a brand that have produced many amazing campaigns over the years. This one was launched in 2022 and analyses data from Goodreads to reveal the most common places in America that books are set in.

The campaign page is a terrific example of how to produce loads of different stories from one dataset. Using the huge number of books that have been published over the years, they’ve created stories around the top cities overall in America, the top city in each state, the top states, and the top locations for different genres such as fantasy, romance, history, and more. They’ve also created an amazing tool where you can enter your zip code or select a city and it will show you the top book for each genre based in your location.

So you’ve got a story for literally every single state, along with stories tailored for fans of different book genres. This is how you produce a hero campaign that you can be outreaching for pretty much as long as your budget allows you to.

4️⃣ Could You Own Some of The Most Valuable Football Memorabilia? by NetVoucherCodes

📊 57 RDs, 46 DR 50+

With the World Cup fast approaching in the summer, I’m sure brands across almost every industry imaginable will be looking at how they can create a World Cup themed campaign. Spoiler alert: not every brand needs to do a World Cup campaign. This however is a good example of the type of campaign a non-sports brand (a finance brand focused on money saving topics for example) could produce to capitalise on the World Cup buzz.

This is from 2021 where NetVoucherCodes researched the prices of football memorabilia from sites such as eBay and Classic Football Shirts. The data seems to be a little more cherry picking items rather than an extensive study, but that was enough to get them some nice syndications across the Reach PLC and National World regional titles.

5️⃣ How stressful is moving home? by Yopa

📊 43 RDs, 9 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is a nice little survey campaign from all the way back in 2019. Estate agents Yopa surveyed homeowners in the UK to find out how stressful people find moving to a new home.

Surveys can be hit and miss sometimes, and other times they can be a go to format for insights that can be gained via a much less expensive source (there’s a whole 250 of them here!). Where I think they are most likely to work well is when they hit on a relatable topic to a large audience (not to say that niche ones can’t work very well too - they do!) that also triggers a strong emotional response. Moving house is a great example of that!

The survey revealed that 46% of people are worried about having noisy neighbours next to their new home, 65% of people reported that they have lost sleep over moving house, but 62% of people think that moving home can make them happier. They’ve also been clever with their survey questions by getting respondents to rank if moving house is more stressful than other stressful life events such as getting divorced (34% said moving house was more stressful) and having a baby (31% said it was more stressful than a house move).

As well as allowing Yopa to earn some quality backlinks on sites such as Forbes, Stylist, and Tatler, it’s a campaign that nicely sets up Yopa as estate agents to position themselves as a brand that can help to make moving home less stressful for their target audience. Yay for a brand’s relevance to a campaign setting them up to positively enhance brand metrics!

And that’s a wrap for Issue 65. 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 🙂