THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 70

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 70 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 is my round up of Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From April

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

PressReacher: Interview with Forbes Contributor Nirit Cohen - What Makes a Pitch Worth Reading

PressReacher: Interview with Lou Mudge - What Fit & Well Wants

PressReacher: Interview with Olivia Dunnett - What Take a Break Really Wants

Off The Record: Local Election Coverage 2026: What Journalists Really Want

BuzzStream: AI-Generated Email Summaries: What We Learned After Analyzing 628 Summaries

Impression: Platforms for seamless SEO and Digital PR collaboration

Prosperity Media: How to create a Digital PR strategy in Australia

Black Letter Communications: Guaranteed media coverage? Major red flag

Pure Digital PR: Where Do The Best Digital PR Ideas Actually Come From?

Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: 3 tips for making your pitches search-friendly

Go Fish Digital: How ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot Decide What to Cite

SEOFOMO: The Best of Published Decks from BrightonSEO UK – April 2026

Aleyda Solis: A 3 Layer Framework to Measure AI Presence, Readiness and Business Impact: Redefining Metrics for the AI Search Era

Search Engine Journal: Study Confirms Google AI Overviews Cut Organic Clicks 38%

The Digital PR Podcast: The Future of PR - Trust, Inclusion, and Industry Unity w/ Sarah Waddington

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

1️⃣ Don't not pitch to a site just because it has a low DR or DA. They can be very flawed metrics and very relevant sites that your audience reads can have a low DR for a number of reasons such as they're very niche site that don't earn a lot of backlinks themselves (the main thing DR is based on), or they're just a new site with a growing DR. Neither make them any less relevant to earn PR coverage on.

2️⃣ You can get DA metrics for domains in bulk using BuzzStream. On a project click on the websites tab and upload the domains you want DA figures for and select the DA column, then BuzzStream will pull the DA in even if you don't have a Moz account.

3️⃣ You can also get DR metrics in bulk from Ahrefs using the Batch Analysis tool here - https://app.ahrefs.com/batch-analysis

4️⃣ Another way to save yourself time from looking up DA/DR metrics every time you add coverage to your trackers - save the figures for the publications you have previously earned coverage on in a separate tab on your tracker and then use a VLOOKUP formula to automatically pull in the DA/DR for future coverage. You will need to update the DA/DR figures every now and then but they don’t change that frequently for top news publications.

5️⃣ Social Media communities such as Subreddits and Facebook groups are great for distributing your campaign direct to your target audience but also landing on a Journalist's radar. If it's super relevant to them they'll be checking these communities for stories too. But you need to make sure your posts aren't seen as being obvious commercial posts on behalf of your brand. Engage in the communities first so it looks more organic when you do share your stories.

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 Sickness Absence in the UK Labour Market: 2025

In the past week the latest ONS report on the number of working days lost through sickness absence in 2025 was released. The report includes data going all the way back to 1995, and is categorised by your usual categories along with the reason for the absence, disability status, and the industry of the employer.

2️⃣ UK Labour Force Survey - Self-reported Work-related Ill Health and Workplace Injuries

This dataset from the Health and Safety Executive in the UK is another really useful dataset on workplace safety, this time focusing on workplace injuries. The data is again categorised by lots of different groups such as region, industry, occupation, and workplace size.

3️⃣ UK Office of Rail and Road Datasets

If you work with a travel brand then these datasets from the Office of Rail and Road in the UK provide lots of great opportunities for data stories. Topics include train station performance, FOI data, rail usage, passenger accessibility, and some really interesting audience insights surveys.

4️⃣ HappyCow

HappyCow is a terrific directory site for finding vegan and vegetarian restaurants in any location worldwide. Other sites like TripAdvisor have filtering options for things like vegan-friendly restaurants but finding specialist directory sites like this will usually provide a bigger sample size of results. There is also lots of categories to filter by on HappyCow including the type of restaurant and features such as outdoor seating and wheelchair accessibility.

5️⃣ Safe Work Australia

Safe Work Australia recently released a new data site for their workplace safety statistics which is very user-friendly to navigate on-site before you start exporting datasets. Similarly to the UK Labour Force Survey data above, you can find data on topics such as workplace fatalities, claims and compensation paid, and categories such as region and industry.

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 Top 100 Universities Ranked for Entrepreneurs by PitchBook

📊 264 RDs, 110 DR 50+

When we talk about the most valuable sites to earn links from we usually go to the highest authority news publications in relevant media sectors. University sites can be another source of extremely valuable backlinks if you have a story relevant enough to their staff or students. This campaign by PitchBook which ranked the top 100 universities around the world based on the number of alumni that are startup founders receiving a round of venture funding between Jan. 1, 2014, and Sept. 1, 2025 is a great case study for doing that.

As a result of the campaign being heavily focused on the Universities themselves, PitchBook managed to not just earn links on top news publications such as Forbes, Business Insider, and Visual Capitalist, but on 23 .edu domains also.

The data is really well put together too and I love how it’s based on PitchBook’s own internal data for global VC investment which makes the brand part of the campaign even stronger. They’ve also updated the campaign annually since 2022 and used that to start adding in growth comparisons for the top Universities vs the previous years of their study. As a result of adding new data to the campaign each year, they added an extra 71 referring domains in the past 12 months for a campaign originally launched in 2022.

2️⃣ The Rise Of Porn-Induced ED Among UK Men by MedExpress

📊 6 RDs, 2 DR 50+

This next campaign for me is a really good example of how to construct a survey campaign that touches on serious topics. Last year, MedExpress surveyed 600 male Brits to take a deep dive into porn consumption amongst men and the effects of it. Surveys on their own can produce good data but what really turns them into a strong campaign is being able to use the survey data to tell an impactful story.

This campaign does a great job of that by using the survey results as context for the larger story around porn induced erectile dysfunction, making the topic work much better for a health brand like MedExpress. The survey covers topics such as the impact porn has on the sex lives and relationships of UK men, the most porn obsessed UK cities, and where men are consuming porn.

The landing page is also a good example of some of the key things for a campaign page to cover outside of just your data - for instance, the beautifully designed graphics that make it easier for readers to quickly digest the key findings, and the expert advice from medical professionals which is perfect for sending strong E-E-A-T signals via the campaign page.

3️⃣ The World’s Most Relaxing Beaches by SpaSeekers

📊 37 RDs, 21 DR 50+

Campaigns that analyse mentions of specific keywords in reviews have become a popular format in the past couple of years for data-led stories, and one that seems to frequently produce very effective results. This is another good example of that type of campaign produced by SpaSeekers who in 2024 analysed reviews of the most relaxing beaches around the world to discover which have the most mentions of the words “relaxing” and “relax” in them.

The dataset used looks to be huge as they’ve revealed the top 50 most relaxing beaches globally, and then the top 25 in each continent and in the UK. Obviously the level of detail we can go into with data studies is largely dependent on the budget and time resource we have for the production of a campaign. However, where possible extending your research for travel campaigns to cover a wider range of countries is a great way to create extra angles for your campaign that you can outreach, and hopefully produce more results to provide a better return on the investment of a bigger budget campaign.

But that’s only of use if you’re actually going to pitch stories to those extra regions that you’re collecting additional data for. The extra angles produced by this campaign looking beyond just the UK and Europe helped SpaSeekers to earn additional links on sites such as Travel + Leisure Asia, and news publications in countries like Australia, Peru, and Brazil.

4️⃣ The Least Expensive Food Delivery Service by State and City by NetCredit

📊 64 RDs, 25 DR 50+

Two of the key themes that I see across top performing campaigns that I analyse are 1) combining two popular topics and audiences together for a story, and 2) regional rankings to create comparisons. This campaign by NetCredit does a great job of hitting on both of those themes.

At the end of last year, NetCredit researched the prices of popular orders from Subway, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC, Popeyes, Burger King and Taco Bell on Uber Eats, Grubhub and DoorDash in each of America’s 100 most populous cities and the five largest in each state, to reveal which food delivery service was the cheapest in each area. Their study found that Grubhub is the most affordable food delivery service in 24 states.

By tapping into a second key topic along with their core focus of finance, NetCredit were able to earn links on domains they probably don’t usually get a lot of coverage on such as Food & Wine and Foodbeast thanks to the food topic, all without losing the brand’s core focus of finance and money saving topics. Diversity of sites you earn coverage on is important for building a great backlink profile and producing bigger results, but that doesn’t have to come at the expense of the relevancy to your core focus topics as a brand.

And then the regional rankings are great for producing lots of unique angles relevant to different states in America. With this map campaign it’s not just the top and bottom states in a ranking that have relevant stories either as they can also use the relative comparison between DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber East for each state. I also really like how they’ve gone a step further and looked at prices on a city level too, giving them even more angles to rank different cities with each state too. Data campaigns can be expensive, so it’s vital that every bit of data you collect helps to create an extra story that you can outreach, ideally to new publications.

5️⃣ This crosswalk in Istanbul visualises a decade of pedestrian deaths by Tuzla Municipality

This week’s final campaign is a terrific showcase of combining data and stunts together to create a very impactful PR campaign. In 2025, Tuzla Municipality in Istanbul transformed a zebra crossing into a bar chart showing the rising numbers of people that have been killed or injured at crosswalks in the county.

A standard report showing the data findings would be good, but the creativity of the presentation makes the data so much more powerful, both for drivers approaching the crosswalk and for people that see the coverage the campaign will have earned in the media. Data on it’s own is great but when you combine it with the storytelling and creativity skills that PRs have, we can make it so much more impactful, especially for topics that can have a genuine change for good, as hopefully turned out to be the case here.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 70. 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 🙂