May 30, 2022

Food Blog Income Report April 2022

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Our first disappointing month in over a year driven by declines in Google Search and Discover results.

Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for April 2022. All of the food related posts on this site are written by Cooking with Carbs chef/recipe creator Anneke Silva, but the posts in the blogging section are be written by me: her husband Isuru.

If you would like to find our previous income and traffic reports or start from the beginning of our journey in 2021, please find the links below:

Month 13: March 2022 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 5834 / Profit -$24.46

Month 12: February 2022 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 5279 / Profit -$24.95

Month 11: January 2022 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 5091 / Profit -$848.36

Month 10: December 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 3759 / Profit -$9.19

Month 9: November 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Repor t – Sessions 2640 / Profit -$732.76

Month 8: October 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2152 / Profit +$55.71

Month 7: September 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1950 / Profit -$24.95

Month 6: August 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1621 / Profit -$24.95

Month 5: July 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2067 / Profit -$23.24

Month 4: June 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2489 / Profit -$73.30

Month 3: May 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1708 / Profit -$859

Month 2: April 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1138 / Profit -$1,077

Month 1: March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 474 / Profit -$2,236 (Q1)

Continue reading to find out why after more than a year since we started the food blog we finally experienced a decline in our Google Organic performance.

Blog Traffic Report – Google Analytics Data Analysis

This section will be will contain a deep dive deeper into Google Analytics. In this post we will focus on the December Audience Overview, Traffic Source/Medium and Users sections.

For more information on where to find the relevant information in Google Analytics and definitions of relevant terms, refer to our First Food Blog Income Report.

The expected traffic is strongly tied to overall site content, and this site we had our lowest content month since the blog started as personal life is getting in the way! This month we further slowed our pace with only 1 new post and finished the month with a total of 115 blog posts. In addition to minimal posts we failed to create any Google Web stories in April.

Users Overview for April 2022

The top channel breakdown for April still favours Organic but this is down from 87% to 82.8%. By contrast direct traffic increased up to 12.8% of the total. We did experience a spike of traffic this month so the gain in Direct traffic could be due to some form of bot traffic.

The total number of users declined by 5% in April to 5003, and Organic users also declined for the first time in a long time, by 9%. Direct users increased by 52% but as mentioned above, this may be due to a single day spike in bot traffic.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for April 2022

In the chart below we can see a spike on April 7th up from a daily baseline of around 200-250 users to around 550. This one time increase of 300 or so users was likely bot traffic, and this is further validated upon closer inspection as all this traffic was to the homepage and was all direct traffic. Given this spike a lot of our monthly stats are skewed. An example of this is our bounce rate which had been trending up towards 92% month in recent months and suddenly had a big decline down to 86%.

The discouraging part of our results this month is that even though we experienced an ~300 boost in users from likely bot traffic we STILL experienced a 6% decline in overall sessions to 5519 and 3% decline in page views to 6430.

Food Blog Traffic Report: All Traffic Source/Medium for April 2022

Once again the top 5 sources of traffic in April were consistent to March with some slight shuffling around in positioning between Pinterest and Foodgawker.

As mentioned previously, the increase in direct traffic of 41% cannot be trusted due to the spike in bot traffic. The decline in 94% of IG traffic is real and is due to no social media posting in a number of months. It was surprising that we were still seeing any traffic coming from IG given we haven’t posted in 15 weeks .

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for April 2022

In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and Google Discover results for April 2022.

Google Search Console – Search Results

The above graph shows our Google Search results over the last 12 months. With each passing month our one year average position average slowly improves (declines), and is down from 17.9 to 17.5.

Looking more closely in April our total clicks declined for the first time in a long time, but our CTR held strong at 3.3% and our average position slightly increased to 15.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Results

Google Discover results took a huge decline in April due to minimal posts being made over the last 1.5 months or so and Google Discovery having mostly a 1-2 month window of traffic after a post and also due to not Google Web stories being made in April.

Google Web Stories

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In April we had no Google Web Story traffic which is consistent with the fact that we made no Google Web stories. It is also consistent with the short term nature of Web stories and Discover traffic overall and that the traffic may only persist for a short period of time (~ 1 month).

The chart below reliably shows the extent of decline we experienced across both Google Search traffic and Google Discover traffic. In April we experienced a decline in Google Search clicks by about 7% and Google Discover traffic had a massive decline by 76%.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for April 2022

Our social media presence remains stagnant with a further 12 follower decline in IG and only 1 follower gained in Pinterest.

Year Over Year Results: April 2021 to April 2022

This is our second month being able to do year over year comparisons and hopefully once we’re further into the blog the metrics will carry more weight and we’ll see more monthly/seasonal trends.

In April 2022 our total blog posts is 174% larger than what it was in April of 2021 (115 vs 41. This growth number will certainly come down in coming months as the number of blog posts we pushed out at the start was MUCH higher than our current rate. In that same time frame our total sessions grew 383% up to 5317 and total users grew even more by 595% up to 5003. Our google search results ofcourse had an enormous year over year growth because our organic was so low in Q1 of 2021, at 8762% growth.

Year over Year Results Comparison - April 2022

Food Blog Income Report for April 2022 – Expenses and Revenues

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Profit results were slightly worse than last month with no revenue this month and having additional expenses due to paying for the annual Mediavine Grow plugin.

One-Time Expenses: $0

No one time expenses this month.

Recurring Expenses: $58.95

This month we were back to our usual monthly Masterclass ($15) and Jetpack Backup ($9.95), plus the annual Mediavine Grow plugin ($34).

Revenue from April 2022

TOTAL REVENUES: $0

Unfortunately we had no Amazon revenue this month.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals

Our personal lives have gotten in the way of blog posting in recent months. This will likely continue into May as I’m starting a new job but hopefully once we both get into a routine we can start posting around 8 times a month again. We’re definitely seeing a decline in google traffic as our posting rate slows.

Long Term Goals:

No new goals here.