The typical UK ranges, in one place
There's no single answer to how much digital PR costs, because there's no single way to buy it. What you can do is put the typical UK ranges side by side.
Agency retainers typically run from £3,000 to £15,000 a month, with the low end buying a small team's time on one market and the top end a full programme across several. One-off campaigns, a single data study or index pitched over a few weeks, typically cost £5,000 to £20,000. Freelancers typically charge £300 to £600 a day. An in-house digital PR specialist typically costs £35,000 to £60,000 a year in salary, before employer costs and the media databases and monitoring tools they need to do the job.
Below all of that sits a different market entirely: paid link vendors selling guest posts for £100 to £500 each. Those aren't digital PR, and they carry a policy risk covered below.
What drives the cost
Four things move the price more than anything else.
The biggest factor is people. Digital PR is mostly senior time: finding the story, shaping the angle, writing the asset and pitching it to named journalists. Junior-heavy teams are cheaper, and it shows in the hit rate.
Next comes story difficulty. Some subjects have plenty of public data and news hooks. Others need datasets analysed, FOI requests made or a survey commissioned, which takes time and money before a single pitch goes out. Our data-led PR page explains what that work involves.
Then there are markets. Pitching the UK and the US means two media lists, two news cycles and usually two angles. Regulated sectors, such as financial services, add compliance review on top.
Finally, volume. Twenty placements isn't four times the work of five, which is why per-placement prices fall as batches grow. Format matters too: a reactive comment programme runs leaner than a national index.
What a placement should cost when priced per batch
Retainers usually price the team's time. Our packages price the output instead: a defined batch of editorial placements, each one a piece of coverage with a PR link inside it.
Growth is £4,500 a month for a batch of ten placements, which works out at £450 per placement. Scale is £7,500 for twenty, or £375 each. Every batch is targeted for completion within 30 to 45 days, billing is month to month, and multi-market or regulated briefs are scoped as bespoke programmes.
That £375 to £450 band is a fair benchmark for an editorial placement. It covers the whole method, Insight, Angle, Asset, Pitch and Coverage, plus reporting of every link with its URL and attribute. Anything far below that is either a very different product or a corner being cut. The pricing page has the full package detail.
Cost per link versus cost per campaign
Cost per link is the easiest number to compare and the easiest to be misled by. Divide any fee by the links it produced and you get a figure that says nothing about where those links sit, who reads the page, or whether they will still exist in a year.
Cost per campaign is the older way of buying and has the opposite problem. You know what you paid for the work, but the output is whatever the news cycle allowed.
A per-batch price sits between the two. You know the number of placements you're buying and the standard each must meet, and the agency carries the risk of a quiet week. When you compare offers, ask what a placement means. For us it means an editorial link inside coverage with a natural anchor, never a sponsored post dressed up as news.
Hidden costs and the red flags on cheap offers
Some costs sit outside the headline fee, and a good proposal says so. Survey panels for a commissioned poll typically add a few hundred to a few thousand pounds depending on sample size. Data tools and media databases are usually bundled into an agency fee but not into a freelancer's day rate. Product PR needs samples, shipping and photography a picture desk can use.
Cheap offers deserve suspicion on a few specific points:
- Guaranteed placements in named publications, which usually describe a paid arrangement
- Links priced by domain metric alone
- No recent Coverage examples you can click and read
- Vagueness about who writes the pitch and who sends it
None of these alone proves an offer is bad. Together they usually do.
How to budget a first quarter
A month is too short to judge digital PR and a year is too long to commit to blind, so budget a quarter. Pick the package that matches the number of pages you need authority on: Growth for one or a few page groups, Scale for a whole category. Over three batches that's roughly 30 or 60 placements, at £13,500 or £22,500.
If your plans include extras such as a commissioned survey or product samples, add a line for those. Then set a review point at the end of month three, judged on the quality of the coverage and the pipeline, with search movement weighed fairly from month four. Our guide to measuring digital PR covers what to look at.
If you would rather have a number scoped to your brief, email info@digitalprservices.co.uk with your website and target pages and we'll reply within one working day.