THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 84

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 84 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 Digital PR Freelancer, Adam Docherty - Why You Should Be Telling Your Digital PR Clients to Build Author Profiles

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

Koozai Couch: Interview with Matt Seabridge (that’s me!)

Finchling: The Always-On PR Report

BuzzStream: 27 Real Subject Line Examples for Every Type of Media Pitch

Bottle: Why AI made humans your best PR asset

Propellernet: The Digital PR Recap: Q3 2026

PRmoment: Why your PR target list might be missing important domains

Muck Rack: How to get your people quoted more: Advice from PR coach Michael Smart

Muck Rack: How to find newsjacking opportunities before your competitors do

Kaizen: Are you tracking AI visibility for ghosts?

Prosperity Media: GEO Citation Analysis: What LLMs Cite in Australia, and Why

USAFacts: Report on trust and perceptions of factual data

Jessica Maccio on LinkedIn: Here's how you can use Claude as your PR assistant and let it monitor those ResponseSource and PressPlugs requests for you

HoldTheFrontPage: NUJ targets Higgerson as it calls for ‘new leadership’ at Reach

9to5Google: Google ‘AI contribution pilot’ tests paying websites when they’re used in AI results

404 Media: People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI

Search Engine Roundtable: Google September 2026 Spam Update Has Been Unleashed

Search Engine Roundtable: Google is showing far more external links in its AI Overviews than before

Google Search Central: Announcing web multimodal Search performance reporting in Search Console

BuzzStream Podcast: Inside Australian PR with Jasmin Hyde (Hyde and Seek Communications)

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Find Real Human Stories for PR and Journalism with Edd Dracott (Folc)

The Digital PR Podcast: From Earned Media to LLMs - Rethinking PR with Stephen Waddington

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Why the Best PR People Could Be CEOs, with Amanda Natividad - Part 1

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Why AI Visibility Is Finally Proving PR Right, with Amanda Natividad - Part 2

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

1️⃣ Ahrefs has a cool new keyword research tool. On Keyword Explorer you can now find keyword suggestions related to your topic that don’t have to include your topic keyword. Search for a keyword and then switch to the “semantic match” button at the top. This makes finding content ideas or creating a seed list of keywords to include for a PR campaign with search volume as your data point a whole lot easier and more comprehensive.

2️⃣ You can get search volume data direct from Google Keyword Planner for as little as £/$10 per month. All you need to do is setup a Google Ads campaign and let it run for a day. Then turn it off and you’ll have full Keyword Planner access for the next month which will give you search volume data for any region. If you don’t have an Ad running then you’ll only get ranges for search volume figures. The Ad doesn’t need to be any good, just set the maximum cost to £10 per day and you can get access to search volume data direct from Google for very little cost.

3️⃣ If you’re analysing search volume data for a “most searched…” campaign, make sure you add up the sum of the monthly searches for your final figure rather than using the average monthly search volume. The averages are rounded. For example, a keyword with 10 searches in the last 12 months has an average monthly search volume of 10, while a keyword with 120 searches in the past year also gets an average of 10. The second keyword however has 12x more annual searches than the first keyword despite the same monthly average.

4️⃣ If you’re doing a campaign based on search volume data to reveal the top…, pay attention to any monthly spikes for your top results. It may have a high search volume in the last 12 months due to a “15 minutes of fame” peak. If it’s a key part of your story, check the search volumes for longer than the last 12 months and check news stories for the topic in the month of the peak. Then decide if it’s an outlier that is best excluded from the story you’re presenting.

5️⃣ If you’re doing keyword research or a “most searched…” campaign on children’s topics, Google Keyword Planner won’t show you any search volume data for these keywords. You can however get search volume estimates via Ahrefs for keywords relating to children’s topics such as kids clothing, etc.

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 Instant Data Scraper

This week I’m sharing some of my favourite tools for scraping datasets. Instant Data Scraper is one of the very best - it’s a free Chrome extension and it’s simple enough to use without requiring any fancy coding knowledge. There’s instructions on the extension page which you can follow but if there’s interest I can publish a post detailing how to use it to scrape sites for PR campaigns. Short version - open a page with data you want to scrape such as a search results page, open the extension, select the table with your data in so it has a red box around it, press the “next page” button so the scraper knows how to go to the next page, then start crawling and watch the scraper work it’s magic. When it’s done you’ll have a dataset that you can export to start analysing (the export may require some cleaning to keep columns consistent but it’s usually read to go).

2️⃣ ExportComments

ExportComments is another very user friendly tool that makes scraping comments easier for people with no coding experience. There’s a free plan which is good for testing the site you want to scrape before committing to the paid version which is good value if you’re exporting a large amount of data for your campaign. The site frames it as being for scraping social media comments but it does also work well on sites such as TripAdvisor or anything with customer reviews. It also has a useful sentiment analysis feature included which you can run over the exported comments/reviews. The exports are very clean and ready to analyse which is a big bonus too.

3️⃣ Apify

I talked about what a great resource Apify is for PRs in my Koozai Couch interview. For those of that you haven’t read it yet and haven’t heard of Apify before, it’s essentially an online search engine for scrapers that people have built and you can rent out for your own usage. These are ideal for if you want to scrape large amounts of data from sites but don’t know how to build your own scraping tools. I’ve shared a couple of my favourite examples below but there’s a scraper tool for pretty much every major website. You have to pay for an Apify subscription and then to rent the scraper which is based on either a fixed fee or the amount of data you export but it works out quite cost effective if you’re producing a full PR campaign from the data you’re scraping.

4️⃣ TikTok Hashtags Scraper

This is one example of a scraper that you can rent via Apify. If you use the Apify search feature you’ll find that there are lots of variations of scrapers for sites such as TikTok. It’s important to browse through them and find one that scrapes the data you want to export and has the most suitable pricing model. This one for example costs $0.50 for every 1,000 videos that you scrape and scrapes a massive amount of detail for searches associated with your chosen hashtag (you can also use it based on a search query rather than a hashtag). Perfect for if you’re looking to get a list of videos and analyse engagements, captions, users, music used, or even get transcripts of the videos.

5️⃣ Instagram Hashtags Scraper

This is a similar Apify scraper but this time for Instagram. Most of these scrapers will provide a free trial, either based on a certain number of hours/days usage, or a set number of results. Take advantage of these to do a test scrape so you can see what data is and isn’t included. Some of them also don’t work as you expect them to so shop around. This one I would definitely recommend for scraping posts data based on a hashtag search. The only part of using these scrapers that can be a bit daunting and maybe requires a small degree of technical understanding are the settings. Usually just running a scrape based on your search with the default settings will do the job but there are settings that will help to avoid you ending with a really expensive scrape if it keeps going with no end point, or stops scraping after so many results before you have what you need.

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 Most Affordable Grocery Store for Halloween Candy in Every State by CashNetUSA

📊 16 RDs, 1 DR 50+

This week I updated my Best Halloween PR Campaigns post that I originally published last year with some new additions that I came across last year. This is the first new addition to the list and is a very well done data study by CashNetUSA.

Many of you will be familiar now with the volume of impressive data campaigns that CashNetUSA publish and this is another one. Here, they compared the cost of the most popular Halloween candy across grocery store chains, revealing which chain is the most affordable to buy from in each state.

As well as analysing what the most affordable store in each state is, they also looked at major cities in America to provide even more detailed regional analysis, helping the campaign to earn lots of backlinks across local radio stations. Not all Halloween campaigns need to be useful resources for customers but this one genuinely is, and fits nicely with CashNetUSA from a brand angle too.

2️⃣ Doctor Issues Warning Over Fancy Dress Cosmetic Lenses by Focus Clinics

Here’s another Halloween PR campaign that tackles a serious topic with some timely expert commentary. In 2025, Focus Clinics issued a warning about the potential damage that cheap fancy dress cosmetic lenses could do to your eyes.

Obviously a story like this is perfectly on brand for an opticians but it also goes to show how seasonal events such as Halloween or Christmas can provide PR opportunities for any brand in any industry if you’re creative enough. The story works well as it’s not only an important warning that has relevance to the general public, but it also has that element of surprise that generates attention when readers see the headline and want to read more about it.

Focus Clinics also used the story to call for stricter regulation around the sale of novelty contact lenses to further spotlight the safety issue of them being available to purchase with no professional guidance or aftercare. Halloween and cause marketing isn’t a natural connection that most PRs would make - this is a great example of how there’s always room for creativity in PR regardless of the brand you’re working with.

3️⃣ Trick & Treat Pouches by Capri Sun

This next campaign is a great example of how brands can have fun with Halloween PR stories and even use the event to poke some fun at their own expense. Capri Sun is arguably most famous for their unique packaging and the difficulty it can cause trying to poke the straw into the packet.

Last year for Halloween they released limited edition "Trick & Treat" pouches designed to prank your friends with. Sold in pairs, one drink is a regular pouch while the second is a disguised version designed to resist the straw and make it impossible to actually open.

It’s a campaign that is simple but fun in nature, and does a really good job at showcasing personality for the brand and helping to humanise it. While it’s a fun idea, most of the coverage does appear to be on marketing sites more so than consumer news publications. Sometimes PRs can get blinded by landing on these sites and treating that as the measure of success, mistaking their peers as the brand’s target audience.

4️⃣ The Most Popular Halloween Candy in America by Little Sleepies

I don’t really like most popular candy campaigns for a number of reasons. However, there’s some other elements to this campaign by Little Sleepies that I am a fan of. Their campaign focuses on a number of different data elements. The Google Trends analysis to reveal the most popular Halloween candies I don’t like because it’s just not a measure of popularity. They do acknowledge this in their methodology to be fair to them. I just don’t know anyone who is a big fan of a certain brand of sweets that is Googling the brand - they just buy them and eat them.

The rest is much more interesting in my opinion though. Using the top candies they analysed nutritional data to reveal which candies have the most sugar content. They’ve nicely framed this as an educational angle aimed at parents - ideal for a brand that sells babies pyjamas.

Little Sleepies also produced a survey for this campaign which I think is very well done. Survey campaigns for me work best when they touch on topics that aren’t the obvious angles you’d think of taking. These aren’t newsworthy and they’re going to struggle to land headlines for your campaign. Instead they asked parents for some of the top reasons why they go through their child’s candy beforehand, with the top answers being “to remove candy I feel has been tampered with” and “to steal candy for myself”.

From a PR point of view these are two great options to first of all include and then have selected by more than half of all respondents. The first response is a great way of setting up an educational angle for parents, while the second one creates the opportunity for a fun eye-catching headline around parents stealing their kids’ candy for themselves, which landed coverage for the campaign on Delish.

5️⃣ Science of Scare by MoneySuperMarket

📊 337 RDs, 165 DR 50+

This final campaign is one that I’ve actually shared before when it was done by a different brand. The Science of Scare campaign was originally done by broadbandchoices. The study measures heart rate data and how it changes while people are watching scary movies, measuring data points such as the average BPM during the movie compared to their resting heart rate, and the biggest spike during those scary scenes that make you jump off the sofa.

The study was first done in 2020 and in 2023 the campaign became a MoneySuperMarket campaign. I’m not 100% sure why but broadbandchoices sits under the MoneySuperMarket umbrella so I guess it’s a case of the parents stealing the business that the kid established 😅.

I love the campaign as a data study but what I love even more is how they repeat the research each year. Bonus points as well for allowing users to see the results from previous years experiments via the dropdown on the table header. The proof of the value in repeating the study each year is clear to see in the backlink profile of the landing page.

September 2024 - 103 referring domains. A year later - 170 and now it’s already on 337. These campaigns not only grow over time but they grow at a faster rate the more that you establish them as an annual study. All those backlinks now help the page to earn over 1,500 organic sessions a month, peaking at over 6,000 last November as the top search result for “scariest movies of all time according to science” (800 MSV in U.S.) and “scariest movies of all time” (2,400 MSV in UK).

And that’s a wrap for Issue 84. 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 🙂