Two formats that do most of the work
Ecommerce brands have two natural routes into the press. The first is product PR: getting a product into the gift guides, seasonal roundups and best-buy features that consumer journalists write all year round. It's the most direct path to a link, and the one most often done badly, with a press release and a prayer. Done well, it's a matter of the right product, the right sample, the right journalist and the right week.
The second is data-led PR. Public data tells stories about how the country shops: retail sales figures, price indexes, search trends and FOI responses show which regions buy the most of something, how a trend spread and what people gave up when prices rose. We analyse it alongside your product range, so you don't need to hand over sales data. Framed well, it earns coverage that a product on its own rarely would, in titles far outside the shopping pages.
Journalists rarely link to product pages
This is the part most ecommerce brands learn the hard way. A journalist writing a gift guide will link to the product because the reader needs to buy it. A journalist writing about a trend, a survey or a piece of research will link to the page that holds the research, and never to a product listing. If the research lives nowhere but a press release, the link goes to your homepage at best, and often nowhere at all.
So we build linkable assets on your site before we pitch: a guide, an index, a data page or a buying guide that sits inside the category it supports. The coverage links to that page, and the page passes authority to the category around it. That's the mechanism behind every digital PR link we report.
The seasonal calendar, planned in advance
Ecommerce PR runs on a calendar that's fixed months ahead, and the brands that win are the ones who pitch early. Christmas gift guides are commissioned from late summer, and the long-lead titles close theirs by October. Valentine's, Mother's Day and Father's Day features are written four to six weeks out. Black Friday coverage wants data more than discounts, by the start of November. Summer and back-to-school roundups fill through June and July.
We map your product range against that calendar at the start of the engagement, so each campaign batch has data-led stories and a product push aimed at a deadline that's still open. Between the fixed dates, reactive comment on retail news, from a rival's collapse to a change in returns rules, keeps the brand in front of the same journalists.
Measuring what the coverage did
The short answer is that a PR link rarely shows up as a line item in revenue, and an agency that claims otherwise is guessing. What can be measured, and what we report against, is the chain that leads there. Branded search volume, which rises within days of a national placement. Referral sessions from the coverage itself, which are small but come from readers with intent. Rankings and organic sessions on the target category pages over the following quarter, which is where the link value lands.
Set the baseline before the first campaign, agree the target pages, and judge the programme on movement in those pages after two or three batches. Our guide to measuring digital PR covers the setup in detail, including what to ignore.
Coverage earned for consumer brands
Campaigns we have run have earned coverage on titles including the Daily Mail, The Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, Metro, MSN and Yahoo News, alongside regional titles such as the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo. An expert's hair care comment in the Mirror, a smart TV warning in the Daily Star, a pensions data story in the Express: the formats vary, the mechanism doesn't. Examples with screenshots are on our Coverage page.
We can't promise a named masthead, because journalists decide what they run and any agency that says otherwise is buying the space. What we commit to is a defined batch of editorial placements on titles with their own readers, and a report that shows the publication, the URL, the link attribute and the page it points to for every one of them.
Packages for ecommerce brands
Growth at £4,500 a month delivers ten placements across several categories, with reactive comment on retail news running alongside the planned stories. Scale at £7,500 delivers twenty placements with multi-market planning, which is where brands selling into the US or EU tend to sit.
Each batch is targeted for completion within 30 to 45 days of the brief, every placement is reported with publication, URL, link attribute and target page, and all packages run month to month with cancellation before renewal. Nothing else is required from you; where a gift guide asks for a sample, we arrange it. Full detail is on the pricing page.