January 19, 2022

Food Blog Income Report December 2021

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In December we finally make our way out of the Google Sandbox with over 40% growth in Google Search 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 December 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 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 if our strong traffic growth continued into our 10th month!

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.

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 upped our momentum a little more with 5 posts and finished the month with a total of 101 blog posts. We’re still maintaining hope that we can get the monthly blog count up to around 8-9 in the coming new year and maintain that long term.

Users Overview for December 2021

The top channel breakdown for December is very similar to the breakdown from November, and will likely remain this way moving forward. Over 80% of our traffic is coming from organic search.

The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. December saw significant growth with Referral traffic, at over 120%. The main driving factor of referral growth is our foodgawker referral traffic which will be shown later. Social traffic also had a boost in December as we revived some of our involvement in facebook groups over the month. Nonetheless, the biggest contributing factor to our overall top line users growth is organic growth at 41%, which from the graph is clearly the largest source of users.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for December 2021

Several of our user specific numbers have remained mostly constant into December, including sessions per user at 1.13 and our bounce rate at around 90-91%. However, a couple concerning trends include our dropping pages per session from 1.16 to 1.13 and our average session duration coming down a fair bit from 39 seconds down to 33 seconds. This is a fairly significant drop and if this continues we’ll need to do a deeper dive into the per post states to determine the cause.

Despite some regression in the stats mentioned above, the most important number is going in the correct direction. Our total sessions had VERY large growth which we’re happy to see with our sessions hitting nearly 3800 with 42% growth.

Mobile users continue to fluctuate between 70-75% per month, and bounce rate, new visitors and new user percentages all remained fairly stable into December.

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

Each month we show the above chart from google analytics and each month I look back to old posts to see how the numbers have changed. Moving forward we may show the “compare” chart in google analytics which compares the month over month growth of each traffic source. The most notable metric is google organic with over 2900 sessions, up significantly from 2000 last month.

The chart below helps parse out some of the source specific growth. As stated earlier we experienced good foodgawker growth in December, at 145%. bing organic continues to have good growth on very low volume, at 136% and facebook experienced 95% growth this month.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for December 2021

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

Google Search Console – Search Results

The above graph is a glimpse of our Google Search results (not including Discover) since the start of our blogging in Q1 of 2021. From this graph we can see that we’re now averaging about 100 clicks per day.

The above graph is a closer look at just December for Google Search results. Throughout the month we were steadily getting around 100 clicks per day, up from 70 at the start of December.

The strong growth in google search results continues to be promising and gives hope that we can make it to the 25-50k level in a year or two.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Results

Google Discover results were still strong this month despite a slight drop from September.

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

September Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 9/5, 9/16

October Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 9/5, 9/16, 9/27, 10/27

November Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 10/20, 11/1

December Discover Results:
Dates of posts: 12/4, 12/12 and 5/14??

This was the first month that we’ve experienced a Google Discover anomaly. Every other month all of the google Discover traffic had come from a post that was made within the last 1-1.5 months. In December we had a post from May generating traffic which was surprising. So far we’re concluding that this post was one that could have been fueled by holiday surge in searches and so it showed up now. We’ll keep monitoring this trend!

You often hear about the google sandbox and that it takes 8-9 months before google finally recognizes you and you start seeing real growth. Last month we were very happy with 30% growth in google search clicks and this month the upward trend gained some steam at over 40% growth and 50% growth in impressions. We’re hoping this is a sign that we’ve gotten out of that infamous google sandbox!

Despite the google search progress, the google discover results continue to be quite sporadic and unpredictable. This month they were down nearly 20% in clicks with no single post having a strong google discover presence like we normally do.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for December 2021

Our social media growth has and will likely continue to be slow. Given a limited number of hours in a day between our kids, our jobs and the blog, we would rather spend time making food and writing blog post than pushing social media platforms. Due to the lack of IG posts in the last few months the number of IG followers continued to drop, this month by 7.

Food Blog Income Report for December 2021 – Expenses and Revenues

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.

This month was a low key month on both the revenues and expenses side. We had no major expenses like we did last month, but we also had minimal revenues with only $0.76 amazon revenues this month. We’re down to only one recurring monthly expense of $9.95 for Jetpack backup, though some of our annual expenses will be up for renewal in the next few months.

One-Time Expenses: $0

As listed above, we had no big one time expenses this month.

Recurring Expenses: $9.95

This month we paid only $9.95 for Jetpack backup.

Revenue from November 2021

TOTAL REVENUES: $0.76

We’re back to having at least some Amazon revenue, but it’s very small at this point.

Lessons Learned Regarding Revenues/Expenses

Lesson for the month: Affiliate sales are highly variable from month to month.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals – Better posting routine with better meal/SEO planning

The goals and the goal status is getting redundant now. At this point we should call them reminders more so than goals, as the act of putting them on this list at least prevents us from forgetting!

While we don’t feel too strongly about all of the goals we do strongly want to get into a repeatable blog posting routine that will yield us at least 8 posts per month.

Long Term Goals:

No progress on any long term goals at this point. We may update the ezoic goal to a mediavine goal, depending on how our growth continues. It’s easier to stomach waiting if it’s a 1-2 year wait than 3-5 years!