Digital PR, or digital public relations, is the practice of earning coverage from online publishers by giving journalists something worth writing about. It draws on public relations, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) at once: you produce research, data, or expert commentary a publication genuinely wants, pitch it to the writers who cover that beat, and the publications that run it name your brand, link to your site, and send you referral traffic. The work runs entirely through digital channels, which is what separates it from the older discipline it grew out of.

Advertising and digital PR both put your brand in front of a publication’s readers. The difference is who decided to put it there. You buy an ad, and everyone who sees it knows you bought it. A journalist writes about you only after judging the story worth their readers’ time, and that judgment is what a search engine weighs when it ranks you and what an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Perplexity draws on when someone asks it a question about your category. I’ll separate digital PR from traditional PR, earned media, and link building below, then walk through how we run a campaign, what we measure, and what a program costs.

Digital PR versus…
Traditional PR Traditional public relations grew up around print media and broadcast: a publicist mails a press release to a list and hopes something lands. Digital PR sends fewer pitches, each one researched against the writer’s beat. A broadcast segment is over when it airs; an article about you is still there next year, still ranking.	Earned media Earned media is the category; digital PR is one way of producing it. Any coverage you didn’t pay for counts as earned media, including a customer’s review, an unprompted mention in a newsletter, or podcasts recommending you. Influencer marketing falls outside it: a paid creator partnership is bought media, no matter how organic the post feels.	Link building In link building, you start with a page on your own site that you want to rank, then look for websites that will point a link at it. In digital PR, you start with a story, pitch it to a journalist, and the link appears inside whatever they publish.

The distinction matters more every year, because brand mentions and citations now influence which companies AI assistants name, and those systems weigh the publication.

How Digital PR Works

It all hinges on a journalist opening an email. A single well-researched pitch can earn top-tier coverage, hundreds of backlinks, and thousands of social shares, and a thousand generic ones earn nothing.

In our survey of publishers, 57% of journalists said they receive between 50 and 500 pitches a week. Media outreach at that volume is a research problem before it’s a writing problem: who covers this beat, what have they published lately, and what do they still need?

That’s why the work starts with the asset rather than the outreach. Original research, data studies, surveys, interactive tools, and infographics give a writer something they can’t get from a press release, and a reason to cite you as the source. Fractl’s data-driven approach exists because unique findings are the most reliable way to earn coverage on merit.

What Digital PR Does for a Brand

A digital PR program earns four things at once, which is why it belongs to public relations and to digital marketing rather than to either one alone:

• Media coverage in publications your category reads. A reader who skips the ad in the sidebar will still read the article next to it, because an editor decided the article was worth running.
• Brand visibility across search and AI answers. Links and citations from independent publishers are among the strongest signals in search engine results, which is why digital PR belongs inside an SEO strategy and inside the wider digital marketing strategy, not beside them.
• Website traffic that converts. Someone who clicks through from an article they were already reading arrives already knowing your name, and that article keeps sending people for as long as it ranks.
• Brand awareness and brand reputation you don’t control. A customer believes a journalist describing your research more readily than they believe your own site describing it, and that article is still there, and still searchable, years after the campaign ends.

Those outcomes compound. A study that earns coverage this quarter keeps earning links, gets cited in follow-up articles, and circulates on social media and other online channels long after the outreach stops.

Examples of Digital PR

Four digital PR tactics cover most of what agencies run:

Original research and data studies Survey a population or analyze a dataset, then pitch the findings. This is the format most likely to earn links from industry publications, because the publisher gets a story no competitor has.	Newsjacking React to a breaking story with data or expert comment while reporters are still writing. In our analysis of 111 newsjacking campaigns, the ones that landed coverage in eight to 14 days averaged 60.5 links, the highest of any speed bracket.
Thought leadership and expert commentary Put a named expert on the record. A quote in an industry publication builds the author’s authority and the brand’s at once.	Creative campaigns and interactive content Maps, calculators, rankings, and visual studies that bloggers and journalists can embed, which is how one asset earns coverage repeatedly.

For Travelmath, we had a lab swab surfaces on planes and in airports and ranked the dirtiest. CBS News, The Washington Post, and CNN covered it, and the CNN placement alone generated more than 14,000 social shares; across the three-part hygiene series, the campaigns accumulated 266 dofollow links and 70,000 social shares. A campaign for the dating app Sapio drove a 3,072% increase in weekly app installs in five weeks.

How To Run a Digital PR Campaign

The process below is what we run for clients, in order.

1. Set the goal before the idea. Rankings for a money page, awareness in a new market, and recruitment coverage need different stories, and a digital PR strategy that serves all three serves none of them. Decide which one this campaign is for.
2. Find the angle only you can own. Proprietary data, a survey nobody has run, or a genuine expert. Ideas any competitor could also pitch get ignored.
3. Build the asset. Produce the study, visual, or tool, and check every figure before you pitch it. A journalist who has to run a correction because of your data won’t open your next email.
4. Build the pitch list by beat. Find the individual reporters who have written about this subject, read what they published this month, and pitch them rather than the outlet’s general inbox.
5. Pitch, then follow up once. Short email, the finding in the subject line, the data attached or linked. A single polite follow-up is fine, but no more.
6. Service the coverage. Answer follow-up questions within the hour, supply images and additional cuts of the data, and keep the reporter’s deadline rather than yours.
7. Report against the goal you set in step one. Not against whatever the campaign happened to produce.

How To Measure Digital PR

These are the measures worth reporting; agree on the KPIs before the campaign runs:

Media mentions and placement quality Count the placements, then weight them. One story in a publication your customers read beats 20 in sites they’ve never opened.	Backlinks and domain authority Track new referring domains from coverage and the authority of the sites linking, using Ahrefs or an equivalent backlink tool. A few high-quality backlinks from national publishers outweigh a long list from sites nobody reads.
Referral traffic and behavior Google Analytics shows how many readers followed the link and what they did next, which separates coverage that drives interest from coverage that just exists.	Branded search volume A campaign that works lifts searches for your name, and that lift outlasts the coverage.
Brand mentions in AI answers Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the questions your customers ask, and record whether they name you. This is the newest of these measures and the hardest to influence directly.

What Digital PR Costs

What a digital PR agency charges is set by the scope and competitiveness of the work rather than by the size of the company. Across the industry, programs run from about $5,000 to $50,000+ a month:

• $5,000 to $10,000 a month. Opportunistic campaigns built on brand stories you already have, with limited content production and targeted outreach.
• $10,000 to $35,000 a month. Several campaign types running together, consistent outreach, and moderate content development.
• $50,000 a month and up. Original research, multi-channel execution, and continuous production for competitive categories.

Fractl has run more than 5,000 campaigns and is recognized for content marketing on Clutch’s Leaders Matrix. We know what a normal link count looks like for a given campaign type, how long coverage usually takes to land, and when a result is worth chasing. Ask any agency you’re evaluating for the same.

Earn Coverage Your Competitors Can’t Buy

Digital PR rewards the brands that give journalists something worth publishing, and that advantage compounds as more people get their answers from AI assistants that draw on those publishers first. Decide what you want the coverage to do, build a story only you can tell, and measure it against that goal. Reach out to Fractl: tell us about your brand, and we’ll tell you the story we would pitch, the publications we would pitch it to, and what it would cost to run.

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