THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 80

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 80 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 Gajendra Singh Rathore, Digital PR Manager at Digital Web Solutions - How to Build an AI-Powered Newsjacking Radar (Without Losing Editorial Judgment)

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

Hawk Academy: The Australia Digital PR Calendar

Rise at Seven: AEO/AI Search & Citation Statistics 2026

Propellernet: What We’ve Learned Winning AI Overview Placements for Clients

Flaunt Digital: Interviewing Client Experts: Content Strategy for the AI Age

The HOTH: How Digital PR Gets You Cited in AI Search

PR Daily: 4 tips to build a thought leadership strategy that reaches the right audience

Press Gazette: Fake Forbes websites and the PR agency offering guaranteed coverage – at a price

Press Gazette: Which UK national newsbrands reach the most under-35s?

Press Gazette: The news publishers on Tiktok with biggest growth since 2024

Search with Sean: International Digital PR, Cultural Insights & AI Search w/ Lau Miguez

BuzzStream Podcast: Personalization in AI Results with Garrett Sussman (iPullRank)

BuzzStream Podcast: The State of the Journalism Industry in 2026 with Dominic Ponsford (Press Gazette)

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

1️⃣ Reports that you've produced as a PR campaign that are gatekept behind an email registration form can be great for capturing customer emails, but beware of doing it for a report that you're pitching to Journalists. The form just creates a barrier and makes them more likely to move away from your pitch, especially if they dislike sharing their email. Instead, send them direct access to the report in your pitch and remove any potential barriers.

2️⃣ If you have a national newsjacking story that you're pitching, pay attention to live blogs that publications have running and pitch whoever is running the live blog that day. They need lots of stories on a single topic to keep the live blog active all day. Audience stories often do very well for landing coverage and potential backlinks on live blogs.

3️⃣ These live blogs are also often more likely to provide follow links than in regular articles, in particular for Reach PLC publications in the UK.

4️⃣ Stories that get featured on a publication's homepage will receive significantly more traffic. If you're landed some great coverage it's worth checking if the story has been promoted on the homepage of major publications. This is a great thing to mention in your reporting as it means the visibility of your story is likely a lot higher than if it was just included within an individual news category.

5️⃣ Strategies without action points are just insights, not a plan of action. Use the SMART acronym (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) to guide your action points so that you can work towards them, and easily review performance against them as you go along.

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 Genius

Genius is an online lyrics database which has tons of data about music artists. Where I think it becomes a really great data source is its search feature which allows you to search for a keyword and it will return a giant list of songs that feature that word in the lyrics. It’s a campaign format that has worked well in the past and has lots of different uses with different topics, sectors, names, etc.

2️⃣ TwiBot

TwiBot is a great Chrome extension which makes scraping Tweets easy for anyone to do. The extension is nice and simple to use, just copy either a hashtag or a keyword and for free it will scrape you the top 300 tweets. The export is really detailed with all the major fields such as user, date posted, likes, etc all included, not just the post. You can also just scrape tweets within a specific timeframe. The free version is limited to 300 tweets per search but the paid version is just £19.99/month, which for a single use to produce a campaign is pretty cost effective.

3️⃣ International Monetary Fund Datasets

The International Monetary Fund has tons of datasets which provide valuable insights that you can take into brainstorms and ideate potential stories from. On this page you can find all of the different global finance metrics that they track and analyse.

4️⃣ PeopleforBikes City Ratings

PeopleForBikes’ City Ratings measures the quality of a city’s bike network in America on a 0-100 scale, making it a nice and simple metric that could be used for “best places to…” indexes. The rankings include over 3,000 cities in the U.S. and also date back annually to 2020 giving some nice comparison points too.

5️⃣ Statistics Canada

Statistics Canada is the national statistical office for Canada and is your first port of call for data to use in Canadian campaigns. The datasets cover lots of industries but sometimes can be limited to how granular the regional data goes for some reports.

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 Emergency Savings Report by Bankrate

📊 4,186 RDs, 1,230 DR 50+

Unless you’re a new subscriber you’ll know how much I love an annual report campaign. This one here by Bankrate is in my opinion one of the best out there, and the results speak for themselves. Their emergency savings report is an annual survey that they’ve released at the start of each year since 2018, revealing detailed insights on how Americans deal with debt and their approaches to emergency savings.

The survey is really extensive and covers lots of different angles which is a big contributor to the amount of coverage that it has earned over the years. I love the structure of the campaign page and the data vis makes the findings really easy to digest. The dropdown on the charts to easily compare data from the different years of the report is such a good feature.

This is more than just a survey to reveal audience insights though. Bankrate use the survey data exceptionally well to help people (and Journalists) understand the context of the topic in America, while also adding their own expertise in the analysis - a great way of showcasing super strong E-E-A-T signals through a PR campaign.

The current url has been live since 2023 and is another great case study of how these reports allow brands to earn both backlinks and new referring domains consistently over time. 1,700 RDs after one year, 2,827 after two years, 3,752 at the start of 2026, and now already well over 4,000. Over 12,000 backlinks in total, and the reports earns them links from around 1,000 new linking domains consistently each year, on top of hundreds of organic traffic sessions each month via ranking for relevant keywords.

2️⃣ The Best-Paying Side Hustle Jobs for a Single Day of Work by NetCredit

📊 53 RDs, 21 DR 50+

This next campaign is another really good example of a data-led campaign produced by a finance brand which does a strong job of targeting its target audience with content on a topic that they know they will care about, in this case, people looking to manage their finances by earning extra money via side hustles.

To reveal the best paying side hustles, NetCredit (who consistently produce fantastic campaigns if anyone is ever looking for campaign inspo on finance topics) studied freelance ad rates from Fiverr for 144 common side hustle jobs and then ranked the side hustles based on the average base price. Interestingly, their research found that the best-paying side hustle for a single day’s work is Marketing Strategy at $150.00 per day.

The campaign also does a great job at creating multiple individual campaigns from the data that they’ve collected by grouping jobs into different categories so they have multiple rankings, and thus multiple stories to pitch to Journalists. For example, as well as the top paying side hustles overall, they also revealed the top AI side hustles, digital marketing side hustles, and ones that require no experience such as focus groups and website testers.

And the proof of why doing that helps a campaign produce better results is in the backlink profile. Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur all linked to the campaign in multiple stories covering different categories from their data - a great example of how if a publication loves your data and you can provide them with even more data there’s a good chance that can help you to convert one piece of coverage into multiple ones.

3️⃣ Busiest flight routes in the world by OAG

📊 229 RDs, 99 DR 50+

OAG’s report on the busiest flight routes around the world is a fantastic example of how valuable internal data can be, especially when used to create a report that gets regularly updated. The report is updated each month and ranks the busiest air routes based on the flights with the largest volume of scheduled airline seats in the current calendar month.

Most report campaigns are updated annually, but this one gets a monthly update, which given the topic makes it a great resource that Journalists can bookmark and regularly refer back to as a source of data. As we saw the value of categorising data to create multiple angles in the previous NetCredit campaign, you can also see the value of it in this campaign too. As well as ranking the busiest flights globally, OAG also ranked the top flights in each continent, as well as domestically in China and America.

Successful campaigns often have similar traits which you’ll notice. This campaign also shares the same trend as the Bankrate campaign when it comes to earning backlinks and new referring domains consistently over time. OAG earned links from 87 referring domains after one year, 131 after two years, and now close to six years later is on 229 with over 50 new domains added in the past year. Likewise, this campaign also earns hundreds of monthly organic sessions via page one visibility globally for “busiest flight routes in the world” and ranking position 7 in the U.S. for “airline routes news” (1,500 MSV).

4️⃣ 2025 Future of Work Survey by CV Genius

📊 96 RDs, 46 DR 50+

Here we have another really well produced survey campaign, this time by CV Genius on how the UK is adapting to the future of work. Released at the start of 2025 the campaign page has 134 backlinks from 96 linking domains, including Yahoo, Forbes, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. Not a bad quartet of sites to earn links from! Interestingly, despite the campaign being a survey of UK workers, it’s also received some great links from publications in other countries such as France and Germany.

One of the key themes across the coverage, not just for this campaign but a lot of really successful survey campaigns, is that Journalists don’t create a whole story exclusively around the survey stats, but rather use the audience insights to provide context to a story they are writing themselves, often an opinion or trends led story.

That’s where surveys can be super valuable for Journalists. If they want to write a piece about a trend such as career catfishing, being able to include a stat like “34% of Gen Z have ‘career catfished’ by accepting a job but not showing up” is a great way of explaining the nature of the trend they’re writing about, especially when you can break the findings down by demo groups.

Some other things I really like about the execution of the campaign and the landing page:

• The “as featured in” bar at the top is a great trust signal for people that come across the survey right as they start reading the findings

• Table of Contents sidebars are really great for UX when you have an in-depth data study like this so people can see the key topics covered and quickly skip to them

• Infographics add so much value for data campaigns and can be really effective to use in your pitches too

5️⃣ Which Jobs Are Using AI the Most? by Visual Capitalist

Visual Capitalist is one of my favourite sites for researching data vis stories. Their team are some of the best out there to study for how they visualise data studies in a user friendly manner. As well as producing their own data stories like this one, they’re also a great site to send your own data campaigns on relevant topics to as their writers often cover some of the best data campaigns out there.

This is one they produced themselves last year around which jobs are using AI the most. It’s a good example of how academic research papers can be an underrated resource for data stories like this one. This Visual Capitalist story takes findings from a research paper which aren’t exactly quick and easy to digest, and presents them in a much more user friendly format. Research papers can be dull to read but you can also find some data gems in them that you can turn into a fascinating campaign idea once you put the rest of the pieces together from a creativity and storytelling angle.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 80. 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 🙂