THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 87

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 87 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.

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

JournoFinder: Halloween PR Campaign Explorer

JournoFinder: How to build your own reactive PR alerts with ChatGPT or Claude

Local News Initiative: The State of Local News in America 2026 Report

The PR Insider: Why the Best Data-Led PR Campaigns Keep Working Long After Launch

JBH: Prove it: A practical digital PR toolkit for measuring AI visibility

BuzzStream: How to Pitch Local Newsrooms in the US (Your Definitive 2026 Guide)

Search Engine Journal: The New Rules Of Journalist Outreach, Based On Millions Of Emails

Pure Digital PR: How to Generate Digital PR Campaign Ideas That Journalists Want

Distinctly: Why Reddit deserves a place in your PR strategy

Connective3: BrightonSEO October 2026: the Connective3 Roundup

Amy Podrasky brightonSEO Slides: Prompt Smarter, Not Harder: Building a Leaner, Greener AI-Powered Workflow… Without Impacting Results

Ross Hudgens Slides: PR for Machines: Earning Coverage That LLMs Repeat

Search Engine Roundtable: OpenAI Drops UTM Parameters From ChatGPT Results

Distinctly Discuss Podcast: How to unlock the stories within brand data w/ Thierry Ngutegure

BuzzStream Podcast: Brand Building with Mordy Oberstein of SE Ranking

The PR Insider Pub Quiz: 19th November in Manchester

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

1️⃣ If you're pitching a big regional story that you really want coverage from, have a quick check of how busy the local news is beforehand or if there's any upcoming news stories likely to dominate the agenda on a certain date. It may be a slow news day nationally but a very busy news day for a regional publication.

2️⃣ Before any type of ideation session, take a break and let your brain rest. Joining a brainstorm after back to back meetings is not going to produce a creative environment for ideas to thrive in.

3️⃣ Don't forget about keyword research when it comes to ideation sessions. You'll often discover new topics that you wouldn’t have previously thought of and keywords can work as great starting points for discussions that can go off into interesting directions.

4️⃣ Data from site searches can be a super valuable source of creative inspiration by unearthing unique searches your customers are making on your website, along with searches that are rising in popularity. They can also serve as good inspo for creative Product PR campaigns.

5️⃣ If you have external links in your campaign page content, set them to open in a new window/tab. Don't send users to another site and then close the tab with your site on.

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 UK Speed Camera Map

This is a fantastic tool that shows you every speed camera in the UK and where it’s located. Across the site you can find pages which will tell you how many cameras there are in each local authority, along with the streets they are on and the speed limit on those streets. There’s also a cool feature which shows you the number of annual collisions near the cameras in each area. It’s also a great tool for personal use which you can use by mapping your route and viewing the speed cameras along your route.

2️⃣ TripAdvisor Reviews Scraper

Another super valuable Apify data scraper here that I’ve used quite a bit. This one scrapes all of the reviews from a TripAdvisor listing page and is a good combination of cost effective and quick to scrape. Within the data you’ll also get lots of supporting data points along with the reviews themselves which is great for providing additional angles to create stories around.

3️⃣ UK Local Authority and Regional Greenhouse Gas Emissions Statistics

This dataset details the level of greenhouse gas emissions for every local authority in the UK, making it a great data source for any environment themed campaign ideas. Data goes back to 2005 which makes it great for comparison purposes, and is also categorised by the source of the emissions.

4️⃣ Espacenet Global Patents Directory

Espacenet’s search function is a fab resource if you’re looking for info on patents at a global scale. Using the search filters you can search for patents by keywords, application date, or the applicant for the patent.

5️⃣ World Bank Group B-READY 2025 Report

The Business Ready annual report produced by the World Bank Group has tons of individual metrics that can be explored and used for business campaigns, in particular global indexes. The report has a great overview of the data but you can also go through individual data points such as business entry and location, market competition, and taxation in more detail using the “explore data” section at the bottom.

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 cost of 1GB of mobile data in 237 countries by BestBroadbandDeals

📊 1,431 RDs, 693 DR 50+

In this week’s newsletter I’ve picked out five campaigns from my archive that earned links from over 1,000 referring domains each. These campaigns are definitely outliers for what you should expect from your own campaigns but they’re also great examples of what is capable at the top end for really high performing PR campaigns.

This campaign was an annual report that BestBroadbandDeals used to produce ranking the best and worst countries for how affordable 1GB of mobile data is for customers. The study was first conducted in 2019 and looks as though it was updated each year through to 2023, finding that costs can vary significantly from one country to another. Costs ranged from as low as $0.02 in Israel up to $43.75 in Zimbabwe. The campaign page is very well produced and I’m a big fan of how detailed their methodology process is.

Even though the campaign hasn’t been updated since 2023, thanks to the massive backlink profile it has built up over those years, the page still earns 200-500 organic sessions each month, even after a domain redirect too. On top of the ultra impressive 1,431 linking domains, the page also earned over 3,800 backlinks.

2️⃣ Worldwide Broadband Speed League by BestBroadbandDeals

📊 1,213 RDs, 635 DR 50+

Long-term subscribers of the newsletter will know how much I preach about the value of getting the maximum value out of a successful campaign that you created. This is another great example of a brand finding a format that worked well and then repeating it across a second topic. This one by BestBroadbandDeals (formally Cable.co.uk) actually came first but I put this one second in the order and I can’t be arsed rewriting the other one to come second.

Like the price of 1GB of data campaign, the process and even the look of the campaign page are very similar, as are the results. Once again, over 1,000 linking domains and hundreds of monthly organic sessions at the peak of the campaign. Many of the campaigns that I use as examples for repeating to get extra coverage are annual reports on the same topic but this is another great case study for how you can do the same but then apply it to research around a different topic. For example, if you’ve had great success with a statistics page, start creating more of them. Repeat the process and fingers crossed you can repeat the results as well.

Like with all good campaigns that turn into an annual report, this campaign added a lot of referring domains in it’s first year and then more than doubled that total over future years, including earning extra backlinks from already linking domains. I also really like how the campaign page gets updated with the historical data each year to make it easy for the reader to see how average speeds are changing year after year.

3️⃣ The Annual Global Retirement Index by International Living

📊 3,051 RDs, 549 DR 50+

Next up is another campaign that became an annual report that has earned massive numbers of backlinks over the years for International Living. The annual global retirement index is now in its 35th year apparently, which probably makes it one of the oldest index campaigns out there. The page itself has been earning backlinks since 2017, with nearly 10,000 total backlinks now from over 3,000 referring domains.

International Living’s retirement index ranks 24 countries (I was a bit surprised it was as low as 24) against seven key ranking factors - housing, visas and benefits, cost of living, affinity rating, healthcare, development and governance, and climate. As a data study it’s very well put together with a clear methodology process that currently ranks Greece as the best country to retire in, just ahead of Panama and Costa Rica.

This is one of the very best campaign examples out there for how brands can use a data study format such as an index to not only earn backlinks but to also use it to establish brand authority and topical association. Obviously having over 30 years of an index gives you a nice boost. However, nearly 10,000 backlinks across huge international news publications is not only going to add value to rankings but also larger brand metrics too.

4️⃣ Safest Cities in America by WalletHub

📊 1,086 RDs, 408 DR 50+

It’s hard to put together a list of PR campaigns that have earned links from over 1,000 referring domains without including one by WalletHub. They’re probably the very best brand out there when it comes to using data-led studies to earn backlinks and boost SEO performance. This campaign ranking the safest cities in America has over 3,500 backlinks and isn’t a one off for WalletHub. This is one of TWENTY TWO campaigns they’ve produced that have over 1,000 referring domains. Based on Ahrefs’ data it also looks as though they have well over 400 with 100+ linking domains. They take this stuff pretty seriously and must be investing huge into these data studies as they’re aren’t small studies.

Pretty much all of them follow a simple repeatable pattern. Find a topic with audience and media interest that is sustainable over time, and then rank the best places to live in America for that topic. Not only do they rank the top states but most campaigns are also repeated with a ranking of the top cities too. Again, find a format that works and scale it into as many areas as possible, then repeat them every single year. I would predict that a good 90%+ of WalletHub’s PR campaigns are updating data studies that they also did the previous year.

And that helps to make producing these campaigns not only more impactful but more efficient too. Assets like copy and graphics are already created, they just need updating. Media lists likewise, and you have a years worth of headlines that Journalists have used for your previous study to base your pitching around for this year. Economies of scale in the form of Digital PR!

These campaigns are as close as you can get to guaranteed coverage each year, constantly not only earning new backlinks but also adding new referring domains too. This campaign on the safest cities in America is a massive source of organic traffic for WalletHub as well. Thousands of sessions each month, and interestingly a big spike as high as 10,000 when the campaign is updated each year. Keywords such as “safest cities in the us” and “safest city in america” get thousands of searches every month, and WalletHub has top billing for the vast majority of them.

5️⃣ The World's Most Innovative Companies of 2026 by Fast Company

📊 1,968 RDs, 711 DR 50+

The final campaign this week is another industry leading example of how annual reports for data studies can turn into incredible link building assets. This one comes via a media publication rather than a brand but the learnings apply just the same, and are a good reminder of how publications are also valuable inspo for campaign ideas and best in class examples of data studies.

Each year Fast Company release their list of the world’s top 50 most innovative companies which is currently topped by Google. Obviously not every brand we do Digital PR campaigns for will have the brand power behind it that Fast Company does but there’s some really smart SEO tactics employed around this campaign that I think are worth spotlighting.

Fast Company produces a lot of stories around the list and they’ve been smart creating a hub homepage within the most innovative companies folder. What this has allowed them to do is to also create different sections such as the podcast around the list that pass SEO value through the same folder and keep things nice and organised from a UX pov.

In addition to that, they use the main list page for the most recent top 50 ranking, but then also keep an archive of previous years within the same folder. That way, the main list url is regularly adding new backlinks each year, while the previous years lists can still be found and also continue to add new links even after the current years list has been published. This has also helped the category to regularly earn around 2,000 organic sessions each month.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 87. 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 🙂