The Role and Impact of Data Analysis for Digital PR

Digital PR is a powerful strategy used to earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative, relevant publications — a key driver of SEO performance. While traditional PR focuses on brand awareness, digital PR is purpose-built to support organic growth by securing coverage that links back to your site. For an introduction to what Digital PR is and how it supports SEO, click here.

To gain media attention, brands must offer journalists something genuinely valuable — expert commentary, timely insights, and above all, compelling stories backed by credible data. The most effective digital PR campaigns are those that align with a client’s area of expertise, helping to build trust, authority, and visibility online.

Broadly, digital PR campaigns fall into two categories: 

1. Quick Win (reactive) campaigns, which respond quickly to trending news with expert takes or rapid data analysis
2. Hero (data-led) campaigns, which are larger-scale projects built around in-depth data insights designed to spark broader media interest.

In this post, we’ll explore the critical role data plays throughout the entire digital PR process — from ideating and validating campaign concepts, to developing a methodology, collecting and preparing the data, analysing and visualising insights, and ultimately measuring the campaign’s results.

Ideation

The ideation phase is where the foundation of a successful data-led digital PR campaign is built — and data analysts play a pivotal role in shaping it. Their input ensures that campaign ideas are not only creative and newsworthy, but also grounded in credible, available, and meaningful data.

Although this is largely a creative pursuit, there are some key ways we can utilise data in informing our ideation process that help guide us toward a successful campaign:

1. Identifying relevant data sources – A strong campaign starts with understanding what data is available. By considering what publicly available data, potentially acquirable data and internal client data are relevant to the topic(s) the campaign seeks to target, we can get a flow of inspiration and also help frame ideas around what is realistic to execute and what insights can be extracted.
2. Trending Topics and Keyword Research – As we are seeking to create timely and compelling stories, analysing trends can be a helpful tool when looking for campaign inspiration. Tools like Ahrefs, Exploding Topics, Glimpse, and social platforms such as Reddit, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) can track emerging conversations and keyword trends, which aids in assessing whether a topic has the potential to resonate with both media and audiences.
3. Canvassing News and Successful Digital PR Campaigns – Reviewing past campaign successes across the industry, their results, as well as what’s been covered in the news, helps not only to see what works, but also identifies opportunity gaps. By scouring the media landscape and digital PR industry publications, we can ensure that a campaign brings something genuinely fresh to the conversation or something proven to generate interest. 

Once potential angles are identified, data analysts help align them with the most suitable campaign format. Some of the most effective data-led campaign types include:

• Indexes: These campaigns rank or compare locations, behaviours or demographics using multiple data metrics.
  Example: “The Most Cities Sustainable Cities in Australia”
• Lifestyle Campaigns: These explore how people live, behave, and spend, often tapping into relatable cultural or social topics.
  Example: “The Cost of Sick Days to the Economy”
• Surveys: Utilising fresh primary data to uncover unique, media-friendly insights not found elsewhere.
  Example: “The Car Brand with the Worst Drivers”
• Data Reports or Deep Dives: These are more comprehensive analyses that distil complex datasets into digestible, trend-based insights.
  Example: “The Interstate Relocation Report”

By grounding creative ideas in data from the outset, analysts help ensure that campaigns are not only compelling but also credible, relevant, and executed with the targeted publications and audience in mind.

Methodology and Validation

Once the best ideas have been selected, the next step is to formulate the methodology of the campaign and test its viability.

This is another part of the process where data and creativity have an opportunity to intersect. Figuring out how to execute the campaign idea requires logical thought into how data can effectively be employed to generate credible insights, and oftentimes innovative thinking is required in order to functionally execute the idea. Not only are there many different ways to create a meaningful methodology for a campaign, but there are also a variety of ways and sources to collect and use data. The wider the breadth you consider in data collection, the more comprehensive your research can become. Often, this can be a key factor in whether journalists decide to trust and take on the campaign. 

This leads to the process of validation, where we ensure ideas can be executed by assessing the availability of the data sources required for the campaign. For each idea, you’ll need to ask:

• Is the data available? – Determine whether the data you need exists and is accessible — either publicly, through the client, or via a third party.
• Are there any limitations? – Assess the data for anything that may restrict the ability to accomplish the purpose of the campaign, such as missing values, outdated figures, lack of granularity, or inconsistent formats.
• Is the data reliable? – Ensure the data comes from a credible source and has been collected using sound, unbiased methodologies.

Some key examples of data sources include:

• Internal data – Often a data-rich resource which can provide unique, interesting and industry-specific insights.
• Government databases –  For example, The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), including Microdata and TableBuilder for customised tables and bespoke data requests. These data sources are rich, trustworthy and cover a wide range of topics including population, housing, energy, health and income.
• Freedom of Information (FOI) requests – Under the Freedom of Information Act (1982), you have the right to access information held by Commonwealth agencies and departments. These provide valuable data as they are both exclusive and credible sources of information.
• Industry-specific reports and resources – Many industry leaders or bodies will produce their own reporting and resources, which can be a valuable and trustworthy source of data.
• Social media and review platforms – For example, Reddit, TikTok and TripAdvisor. These platforms can be utilised by scraping to understand trends, popularity and sentiment through metrics such as views, likes, followers, mentions, hashtags, reviews and comments.
• Google Maps – A handy tool that can provide analysis with a geographic dimension, that also provides data on landmarks, businesses and reviews.
• Search Volume – Keywords can underscore trends and forecasts that add valuable insight to your chosen topic.
• Surveys – By utilising either a trustworthy third-party source to gain insights nationwide or by surveying specific populations through the user base available to a client, surveys provide an opportunity to create exclusive, first-hand insights on pertinent topics.

The good news is that the quality and volume of data around us are increasing every day. These are just a few sources of data we can utilise, but curiosity and open-mindedness allow you to keep discovering new ways to utilise these sources effectively, and parse through them to find what’s credible and newsworthy.

Data Collection, Cleaning, Analysis and Insights

This leg of the process should be the bread and butter for data analysts, where once the ideas have been validated and the methodology set out, the job is to collect and collate the necessary data, prepare and clean to ensure accuracy and consistency, then perform the calculations and analysis necessary to build out the campaign. 

The process is where data analysts are essential in transforming large amounts of data into clear, concise insights that can be interpreted by people with a non-data background, and provide newsworthy analysis that the Digital PR team can outreach to journalists. 

When conducting analysis and insights, a few considerations and ways in which data analysts can make include:

• Extract as many interesting angles as possible – This allows for the potential of different stories within a campaign to be picked up and thus a higher probability of success. Always think of the potential headline figures that the data is showing and dig as deep as you can to squeeze the most out of what you have.
• Use clear, understandable metrics – When presenting data, keep the end consumer (the reader) in mind. Much like journalists writing to the reading level of 12-14 years old, we need to be able to translate our findings to a similar level. For example, metrics like percentages, rate per 100,000 and ratios are generally easier to understand for the ordinary reader. If you are introducing complicated ideas, it’s always a good idea to explain these early on.
• Systematic data checks and documentation– To ensure accuracy, systems should be in place to document the process that allows for review by multiple people.
• Include a comprehensive methodology – It’s important that journalists have trust in the data and methodology so that they can confidently publish it. We do this by including an extensive ‘About the Data’ section with sources in our campaigns.
• Design and Visualisation – Often an overlooked component of insights, this should be one of the priorities when presenting data. Making visualisations easy to understand, interactive and visually appealing helps communicate findings to readers. The goal should be that they are able to quickly glance at a chart, graph or table and know what the key insights are. Highlighting, colours, text size and types of charts are some examples of small touches that can add to how our brains can process information quickly. From our experience, journalists appreciate great visualisations, so we can make their job easier if you provide them with embeddable charts.
• Storytelling – Although we are dealing in numbers and data, we as humans respond emotionally to stories that are relatable and ones we can connect to. It’s always good to think about why people should care about this data and look to zoom in and zoom out of your data so that you can clearly see the overall arc of your story as well as the individual components that make it whole. Viewing your data through the lens of a story also helps keep alignment with the purpose of the campaign.

Measuring Impact

Finally, data plays a crucial role in measuring the impact data-led campaigns have in digital PR performance. We can see from our past campaigns that although our hero campaigns are more time-intensive than reactive campaigns, they produce around two and a half times more coverage and twice as many links. Data-led campaigns not only provide an impact with headline figures, but also establish brand credibility by showcasing industry expertise that produces great EEAT signals and brand awareness.

The power of data can also extract more in-depth metrics that analyse impact and further contextualise the effectiveness of digital PR activity. Through detailed analysis, we can look at how SEO (and increasingly AI visibility!) is impacted by examining changes in targeted keyword rankings, the quality and velocity of new links, comparisons with competitors, traffic to targeted pages, organic conversions and organic search volume.

Campaign Examples

• EzLicence The Cost of Getting your Licence
• ROLLiN’ – Most Loved Road Trips
• iSelect – Pregnancy Places

Key Takeaways

• Data is essential at every stage of the digital PR process, from ideation to reporting, and should be viewed as both a creative tool and a strategic asset.
• Collaborating with data analysts early in the ideation phase ensures campaign ideas are grounded in available, reliable, and newsworthy data.
• Understanding the data landscape — including internal client data, public datasets, trend tools, and industry reports — unlocks more campaign opportunities and angles.
• Validating ideas with feasibility checks (data availability, reliability, and limitations) helps avoid dead ends and wasted resources in production.
• Familiarity with campaign formats like indexes, lifestyle data stories, surveys, and deep-dive reports allows PR teams to align creative ideas with the right data structures.
• Data storytelling requires clear, relatable insights. Focus on extracting headlines, regional angles, and multiple narratives to increase pickup potential.
• Visualisation and presentation matter. Well-designed charts, maps, and graphics make insights digestible for journalists and appealing for readers.
• Comprehensive documentation and transparent methodologies build trust with the media and enhance the credibility of your campaigns.
• Measuring success goes beyond link counts. Track SEO impact, keyword movement, organic traffic, AI and brand visibility to prove long-term value.
• As digital PR continues to grow in sophistication, data analysis has become central to building smarter strategies, crafting compelling campaigns, and demonstrating real impact.