September 18, 2021

Food Blog Income Report August 2021

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August was a down month in many aspects, but we continued our strong Google Search results growth at 49% month over month. We also gained a bit more insight in to what drives Google 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 August 2021. 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, please find the links below:

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)

Keep reading to see if our trend of increasing revenue increases!

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 August 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.

It is important figure to note the number of blog posts on our site, as all of our upcoming traffic figures are tied to the amount of content on the site. This month we wrote only 5 posts (our lowest total yet) and finished the month with a total of 82 blog posts.

Users Overview for August 2021

The top channel breakdown for August 2021 is a very big shift from July. Instead of Organic and Referral traffic both leading the way, this month saw almost 70% of traffic come from Organic Search. The main drop off of referral traffic is likely due to the low number of blog posts for the month and correspondingly the traffic that comes from marketing each post.

The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. August experienced another quite large drop in users, by about 19%. This decline can be attributed to the decline of both direct users and social users. That being said, Organic users continue to go up month over month and this month saw a 19% increase in Organic users.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for August 2021

August was finally free of bots, so the numbers are a true representation of the blog traffic. A few continuing trends since our blog started is having the bounce rate increase month over month and the average session duration decrease. In April our session duration was 85 seconds and bounce rate was 68% and these have shifted to 41 seconds and 87.5% respectively.

The overall sessions for the month are down again from just over 2000 sessions last month to 1621 sessions this month (a 22% decline). Page views also declined 22% this month to 2006.

As stated previously there are a few factors for this decline. The first, as we will cover later, is a drastic drop in Google Discovery traffic over the last few months. However, another significant reason is simply only having 5 new blog posts in August. With only 5 new blog posts comes a decline in foodgawker traffic (since we make one entry per post) and also comes a decline in Facebook traffic as we share fewer posts on social media.

The distribution of our audience is also shifting somewhat over time. With each passing month we are experiencing more and more new users and more new visitors, which makes sense since more of our traffic is new users finding our blog form Google as opposed to repeat social media visitors.

Food Blog Traffic Report: All Traffic Source/Medium for August 2021

The table above shows the source/medium breakdown of all our traffic for August 2021. Google organic traffic leads the way and was over 1000 sessions for the first time. Google organic traffic was the only large traffic driver that experienced growth in August. Bing organic traffic also experienced significant growth (91%) but is still a small contributor at 21 sessions.

Google organic traffic made up 67% of all traffic sources in August, compared to only 40% in July and 29% in June. Facebook traffic experienced the biggest decline with a 75% drop in August.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for August 2021

In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and Google Discover results for August 2021.

Google Search Console – Search Results

august 2021 google search results 7 months

The above graph is a glimpse of our Google Search results (not including Discover) since the start of our blogging in February. From this graph we can see that we’re now averaging about 30 clicks per day.

The above graph is a closer look at just August for Google Search results. We can see some decent progress where at the start of the month I was getting at most around 30 clicks per day, we had a few days over 40 clicks as the month progressed.

Despite all other sources of traffic being down the last few months, we’re happy that Google Search Results continues to grow nicely.

Google Search Console – The Tanking Google Discover Results

Last month I said that our Google Discover results were the most frustrating so far, since we had such a successful July at 1.2k monthly clicks. Well that frustration continues and in 2 months we went from over 1k clicks to 11. Just 11.

From the graph below we can see that we actually had 0 clicks and impressions for most of the month, with a few coming in towards the end of the month. This still remains a mystery as we haven’t changed anything in terms of how we post.

I decided to look further into which posts were contributing to Google Discover results in any particular month. We all know that the more time since a blog post, the more likely you are to rank well and get Google Search results, but does this apply to Google Discover? Apparently Not.

June Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 5/14, 5/24,5/26, 6/7, 6/11, 6/16, 6/18, 6/25, 6/30

July Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 6/11, 6/18, 6/27, 6/30, 7/3, 7/5

From the dates above we can see the Google Discover results for any given blog post only seem to last about 1-1.5 months and then nothing. None of our June Discover results were from blog posts prior to Mid-May and none of our July Discover results were from blog posts prior to Mid-June.

Conclusion: Google Search Results are longer term and persistent and Google Discover results are short term and likely to occur ~1-6 weeks from the date of posting. I will continue to monitor this trend.

The table below summarizes the trends in Google Search and Discover results. Google Search clicks are up significantly in August, with 49% growth which is amazing and we’re really happy about that. Surprisingly total impressions were up only 16%, so we were converting into clicks much better in August.

Google Discover results were down 97-98%. Enough said. Hopefully once we start posting more again come September or October this will pickup.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for August 2021

Our Social Media involvement has been quite slow/low since July and our follower growth has slowed similarly. This is also tied to our rate of posting which has also slowed, and so we have less content to post on IG and Pinterest as well.

Food Blog Income Report for August 2021 – Expenses and Revenues

This month the only expenses we’ve incurred are the two monthly recurring expenses and no additional one time expenses. This means that our expenses are as low as they will be in any month, at $24.95. Unfortunately our revenues were $0 this month for the first time in a few months.

One-Time Expenses: $0

This post contains affiliate links and which means we’ll receive a commission if you purchase through our links, at no extra cost to you. This helps keep the content free on this site.

Back to back months with no one time expenses. Hopefully that’s a sign that what we’ve got can sustain us moving forward for some time. That being said my birthday was recently and my friends got me a Henry’s gift card, so I suspect a new lens purchase is in the future.

Recurring Expenses: $24.95

For August we made no new purchases and our only expenses are our running monthly expenses (MasterClass Education and Jetpack Backup)

Revenue from August 2021

TOTAL REVENUES: $0

Back to $0. Hopefully this is just a one month anomaly.

Lessons Learned Regarding Revenues/Expenses

Lesson for the month: We need to put more effort into other revenue streams other than Amazon before we can rely on ad revenue.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals:

We finally accomplished a short term goal! Unfortunately it was the first non blog related goal. The goal was simply to have fun and enjoy the summer. We did manage to do that, as we went away for a full week early in August and then many other weekends away. This resulted in a great month but not so great for blogging.

The most important new short term goal is to get back into a posting routine. We were posting 3x a week at one point. I think my wife and I both agree that 3x was likely too aggressive and was burning us out, we can probably still aim for 2x a week.

Long Term Goals:

We have started planning possible future posts that are more promising for SEO than what we’ve been doing so far, so hopefully that makes a difference in future traffic.