March 26, 2022

Food Blog Income Report February 2022

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Our first month making Google Web Stories and we achieved nearly 170 clicks in the month for each Web story!

Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for February 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, please find the links below:

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 how Google Web stories contributed to our clicks in February!

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 we slowed somewhat with only 4 new posts and finished the month with a total of 110 blog posts. In addition to posts we also started creating Google Web stories this month and we created 3 web stories.

Users Overview for February 2022

The top channel breakdown for February continues to shift more towards Organic, with 87% of users coming from Organic vs 82% last month.

The total number of users growed a solid 8%, though less than prior months. Organic users grew 12% but this was offset in a decline from both referral users and direct users.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for February 2022

Our metrics continue to be pretty consistent from month to month, with the pages per session and bounce rate not changing much into February. The number new users continue to rise, up to 92% in February and unfortunately the number of sessions per user is slowly declining to 1.10 from 1.12 last month.

Following a large growth in Sessions in January (up 35%), the number of sessions stabilized this month with only a limited 4% growth.

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

The chart above is a good overview of how much traffic comes from each source, with organic and direct still being the largest two sources. However, this month has a new third largest source with 234 sessions under discover/organic. The main reason for this is that some of the Google Web Story traffic (discussed later) is categorizes under discover/organic.

yahoo organic experienced significant growth this month at 70%. Although it is still a small amount of traffic, it is encouraging seeing other sources of organic traffic grow.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for February 2022

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

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 150 clicks per day.

The above graph is a closer look at just February for Google Search results. Throughout the month we were steadily getting around over 140 clicks per day.

In addition to clicks, our average position is improving down to 14.4 from 16.8 last month. Our average CTR is down slightly from 3% to 2.9%.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Results

Google Discover results were up significantly to around 875 this month, up 221% from last month. The main driver to this growth was Google Web stories as we’ll discuss later. The discover clicks separate from Google Web stories was 352 which was still strong growth from the 268 last month.

Google Web Stories

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you.

As mentioned a few times in this post, we’ve started creating Google Web Stories this month. Google Web Stories are short vertical slideshows that can link to a particular blog post. The best part of these Google Web Stories is that the content is yours and exists on your own domain as opposed to on a different social media platform.

In February we created three Google Web stories that link out to some of our historical recipe posts. Even though we didn’t make as many as we had originally intended, we were extremely pleased to see that our Google Web Stories had 960 sessions in only a month (which is an average of 320 per story). Google Web stories are a great way to boost your site’s exposure and traffic and better yet they are easy to do and take only a fraction of the time and effort of a full blog post. Check out this amazing Google Web Stories Masterclass by Cathy Dean who walks you through everything you would need to know about why you should make Google Web stories, how to make them, how to track your traffic with separate Google Analytics Properties and more.

One important thing to note about Google Web Stories is that there is a distinction between the traffic you are getting to the Google Web Story itself (960 sessions listed above) and how many clicks you get from your web story into your blog post. Below are the results from the 3 web stories we made in February and we can see they achieved a total of 508 clicks to our blog posts which is amazing! This means that each story averaged 170 clicks to the linked blog post but better yet it means out of all the people that saw the Google Web Story we had 53% click through to our site which seems like a great conversion to me (508/960). We’re exciting to keep making these web stories and providing updates on our data going forward.

Despite the excitement of starting Google Web stories, our Google Search Console clicks were stagnant this month with 0% growth and 3910 clicks, though our impressions were up slightly by 4%. Our Google Discover Traffic did have an amazing 221% growth though and even if we exclude the Web stories traffic we still would have experienced 31% growth.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for February 2022

I will try to make it a goal to resume Instagram posting in the upcoming month, especially because we are getting clicks from IG into the posts lately. Without posts we lost another 21 IG followers this month, though Pinterest and email continue to grow slowly.

Food Blog Income Report for February 2022 – 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.

Blogging life leads to a lot of swings. Unfortunately after our best month ever in terms of Amazon affiliate revenues we were back down to 0 this month!

One-Time Expenses: $0

No one time expenses this month.

Recurring Expenses: $24.95

This month we were back to our usual Masterclass ($15) and Jetpack Backup ($9.95).

Revenue from February 2022

TOTAL REVENUES: $0

Unfortunately we made $0 revenue from Amazon this month and nothing from any other streams either.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals

No new short term goals for March but we finally achieved one of our short term goals and started making Google Web stories!

Long Term Goals:

No new goals here, but we continue to make progress on our SEO knowledge and food photography.