THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 68

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 68 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.

This week we’ve had two amazing guest contributions to the Digital PR Tips blog. Firstly - Using Reddit to Level Up Our Ideation Sessions

And also - How Content Amplifies PR Campaigns to Drive Search & AI Visibility

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.

Reuters Institute: Understanding young news audiences at a time of rapid change

Ofcom: Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report

Propellernet: The Digital PR Recap: Q1 2026

Matt Black on LinkedIn: How to get Reddit data for campaigns and trend monitoring

Passionfruit: How LLMs Search for Citations: What They Look For and What They Actually Find

Search Engine Land: Why no amount of SEO can fix a broken brand

Search Engine Land: Bing, not Google, shapes which brands ChatGPT recommends

Digital PR Explained Podcast: We Need to Talk About “Spray and Pray” (Part Two: What Actually Works Instead)

BuzzStream Podcast: Building Links That Impact the Bottom Line with Garrett French

BuzzStream Podcast: Google Zero: Is the News Industry’s Decline Really Google’s Fault? w/ Barry Adams

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

1️⃣ KPIs for Digital PR campaigns are good but only if they're based on reliable benchmarks such as previous campaigns you've launched to a similar audience on a similar budget. Benchmarking against other agencies is useless because you have no idea what resources they had available.

2️⃣ Referral traffic is not only one of the KPIs that clients will be most interested in, it's also one of the easiest ones for them to understand. Don't underestimate the importance of reporting on traffic that you're earning from people clicking on links in your coverage.

3️⃣ Once your index has gone over over 4-5 different data points, consider either cutting it down to avoid it becoming too confusing, or combine some of the metrics together so that's it easier for the reader to comprehend, and simpler for you to explain in your press release.

4️⃣ Struggling to come up with ideas on a topic? Pop your keyword into Answer The Public and you'll get hundreds of questions that people are searching for answers to around your topic.

5️⃣ If a Journalist sets you a deadline and you're going to miss it because your client hasn't responded, rather than leaving them hanging and doing even more damage to your relationship with them, give them a heads up a few hours before their deadline if it's looking like your client is about to let you down with sending you the content you agreed to share.

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 Fraud and Computer Misuse in England and Wales

This ONS release from a couple of weeks ago is a handy collection of datasets from different fraud and crime data sources for England and Wales. The data covers the number of instances of various forms of fraud and computer misuse crimes with annual figures for the past decade to spot trends. There’s also a lot of demographic breakdowns covering age, gender, region, religion, marital status, education, and interestingly, how often victims visited pubs/bars and nightclubs in the past month.

2️⃣ ChartMasters

ChartMasters is a fantastic site for CD sales and streams data, or if you’re just a fan of both music and data. The site curates music data from lots of different sources to create all time rankings such as the best selling artists, most streamed artists and albums, and more niche lists such as the most streamed debut albums on Spotify. As you scroll down the homepage you’ll also find some amazing tools that give you access to deep dives on specific artists including their total number of Spotify streams rather than adding them all up yourself. There’s also some fun games at the very bottom too if you want a distraction from your work today.

3️⃣ U.S. Quarterly Summary of State & Local Tax Revenue

This U.S. Census dataset which is updated each quarter provides a breakdown of the total value of all taxes collected in each state. As well as the state breakdown which is great for a potential map campaign, the data is also categorised by the type of tax, including property taxes, license taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes for specific products such as fuel, alcohol, tobacco, and sports betting.

4️⃣ U.S. National Health Expenditure Data

Here you can access data on national health expenditure in America. Using the contents bar on the left hand side you can access a ton of different datasets that provide historical data going back to 1960, and breakdowns of expenditure data by age, sex, and state.

5️⃣ Energy Sources by Country

On the International Energy Agency website you can find tons of great data points for energy supply and usage for countries around the world, along with summaries of energy related government policies. A niche one but a useful site which has lots of great data all curated together in one place.

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 Surveillance Camera Statistics: Which City Has The Most CCTV? by Comparitech

📊 799 RDs, 347 DR 50+

This is a very cool data-led campaign that Comparitech produced back in 2019 and is still earning links today. To discover which cities were the most surveilled they researched the estimated number of public CCTV cameras in use across the top cities around the world.

What I like about this campaign is that there isn’t one single data source that has a database of CCTV cameras ranked by city for example, so they had to do some good old fashioned desk research to find the numbers from various different sources, which when you’re covering global cities can be challenging with potential language and cultural barriers during your research.

As the data isn’t easily available that makes this campaign an extremely valuable asset for both Journalists and readers who are studying the topic. And it’s a topic that has a decent amount of search interest that Comparitech’s campaign page is capitalising on due to the fantastic volume of links earned - “most surveilled cities in the world” (200 MSV ranking #6 in the UK) and “most surveilled city in the world” (200 MSV ranking #3 in the U.S.).

2️⃣ Europe's most authentic food destinations by Saga Holidays

📊 34 RDs, 21 DR 50+

Another really interesting data campaign here, this one produced more recently at the back end of last year by Saga Holidays who revealed the top 10 most authentic food cities in Europe. To reveal the top cities, they researched restaurant reviews across the top 100 European tourist cities from Eurostat and analysed how often diners used authenticity-related keywords such as “authentic,” “homemade,” “traditional”, and cuisine-specific terms. They then ranked the reviews based on the number of mentions of authenticity, and the sentiment of the reviews.

Travel indexes are ten a penny these days, and while a lot of them continue to earn great coverage, having angles that are especially unique will help your index to jump off the page in a Journalist’s inbox. This does that, and I also like how they’ve added a second ranking for the top cities with tourist visits part of the ranking to show the best authentic food cities that aren’t as busy or touristy.

The campaign earned links on sites such as TimeOut, Travel + Leisure, and The Manual, along with a series of Hungarian news sites thanks to Budapest topping the ranking.

3️⃣ Britain’s most expensive streets by Rightmove

📊 11 RDs, 8 DR 50+

For the past few years Rightmove has released an annual ranking of the most expensive streets in Great Britain based on their own internal data for asking prices of properties. We all know that I love an internal data campaign, and among the top reasons for why they can be so valuable is that many of them naturally lend themselves to also becoming annual reports. Great campaign ideas aren’t easy to come up with so when you come up with one that you can repeat each year, make sure you take advantage of it!

As well as being a great source of new links every year, reports like this are fantastic for establishing really strong topical authority signals and enhancing brand metrics which compound with each year that you produce reports like this based on internal data.

Although the campaign and the data is great, it’s a tad messy from an SEO point of view. Rightmove has two landing pages for the most recent 2026 data which can be hurting their ability to rank the best page for relevant keywords. They also produce a new campaign page and url for each time they release a new report. Ideally, they would be using one url and updating the copy on the original url rather than creating a new one each year. This helps to keep all of their links to one url and avoid cannibalisation issues to give it the strongest platform for enhanced organic visibility.

With each new report they seem to just stick a dash and a number on the end of the original url which also probably isn’t ideal as you could easily include the year of the report in the url instead to make it clearer to search engines, but especially to users, which version of the report they are reading. You can see the effect of this when you analyse the organic traffic trend in Ahrefs/Moz/Semrush/etc and see how they have to rebuild their organic traffic every time they release a new report on a new url.

4️⃣ 2025 DoorDash Delivery Trends Report by DoorDash

📊 62 RDs, 33 DR 50+

From one internal data campaign that became an annual report to another one, this time DoorDash’s annual delivery trends report. I’ve noticed DoorDash producing a lot of audience insights reports based on internal data and they always do a really strong job of creating reports that are super detailed and insightful.

They’re also extremely well designed and easy to read which I think is such an underrated aspect of a great report campaign. While campaigns with very basic landing pages can definitely be very effective link building assets, campaign pages, especially for reports in my opinion, have a much stronger impact on audiences reading your campaigns in terms of how well they remember the report, and thus your brand.

DoorDash also recently released their 2026 workplace meal trends report which is another very well put together report that is really user friendly to read through and easily digest. It’s also another good example of using a nice influx of creativity to differentiate your content from similar campaigns that competitors might also be producing by focusing on a more niche topic, but one that still has a strong audience and media appeal to it.

5️⃣ The most expressive languages in the world by Preply

📊 25 RDs, 24 DR 50+

The next campaign comes from Preply, a language tutors site that has been producing lots of great data-led Digital PR campaigns over the years, many of which have a really strong connection to their core topic as a brand - languages!

This campaign uses a number of different metrics and data sources to analyse the most expressive languages around the world. I really like how the campaign is essentially a series of campaigns put together on one landing page around a common topic. For instance, they researched which languages have the highest number of unique words in their dictionary (English apparently!), something which would be a strong enough campaign on its own.

But they’ve also build on the concept and expanded it with other data-led insights including the top languages with the highest volume of swear words, the countries with the shortest and longest broadcast watersheds for profanity restrictions, and examples of extinct expletives from the Victorian era that have fallen out of our modern vocabulary.

My favourites are “fopdoodle”, an old-fashioned word for someone who makes poor choices, “jobbernowl” which is used to describe someone you really don’t like, and “lickspittle” which is for someone who sucks up to their boss. I’m sure we’ve all worked with a lickspittle at some point in our careers 👀.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 68. Same time again next week ✌️

Found this useful? You can sign up to receive The Digital PR Observer Newsletter in your inbox each week for free by clicking the button below.

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 🙂