Food Blog Income Report July 2021
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July was our first traffic dip since our food blog started in February. Despite that, there are some good signs that growth will come, including 33% growth in Google Searches.
Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for July 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 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 learn why our direct users were down nearly 70% and Social users down over 35%!
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 July 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 10 posts and finished the month with a total of 77 blog posts.
Users Overview for July 2021
The top channel breakdown for July 2021 is a very big shift from June. Instead of Direct traffic leading the way (largely from Google Discover), this month the most traffic came from Organic Search and followed closely behind by Referral traffic.
The image below compares our previous months User Overview numbers. July unfortunately experienced a significant decline in overall users, down 31% month over month. While Referral users went up 11%, Direct users saw a significant decline of 66% and Social users declined by 36%.
Referral users were the only category that went up in July, likely carried by the growth of Foodgawker users visits.
Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for July 2021
Another month and another bot spike. This time google analytics managed to label it as bot traffic and it accounted for 400 sessions this month. The bot traffic is mostly annoying when you’re trying to keep a monthly track of changes!
Once the impact of the bot is removed our traffic lands just above 2000, which is a large drop of 27% from last month. As suggested earlier, the main traffic sources that dropped this month were direct traffic and social traffic. The main cause of direct traffic dropping was due to a few strong months on Google Discover which seems to be falling off at the moment.
I think we’re also seeing the summer dip in overall web traffic. I’m sure this year is especially bad as everyone has been cooped up due to COVID and the cases were momentarily slowing down globally. This is not only true for our website visitors but for my wife and I as well. We’ve noticed our social lives picking up somewhat, which is resulting in less time to dedicate to the blog and to social network participation.
The audience breakdown is mostly similar to previous months, with slightly less new users and visitors compared to the prior month.
Overall it is disappointing to experience our first month with a decline in sessions and page views, but I’ve seen many bloggers comment on year over year being a very important metric that takes into account the monthly and seasonal swings in traffic.
Food Blog Traffic Report: All Traffic Source/Medium for July 2021
The table above shows the source/medium breakdown of all our traffic for July 2021. The bottraffic was our 2nd biggest source of traffic at 400 sessions, and this has been removed from all growth metrics. Google Organic searches were down from last month as a significant portion of the Google Discover traffic last month was split across Direct and Google Organic.
Yummly and foodgawker are shown below as the only two reasonable sources to experience gains in July. Yummly sessions are still somewhat low at 27 sessions but were up 238% a month. We didn’t do anything different on yummly this month so hopefully there’s some time factor to seeing traffic pickup. Foodgawker also experienced 21% growth and this is largely due to having next day approvals on each foodgawker submission at the moment.
Direct traffic experienced a significant decline of 61% due to a large decline in Google Discover traffic which will be discussed shortly.
Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for July 2021
In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and Google Discover results for July 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 February. From this graph we can see that we’re now averaging about 20-25 clicks per day. These graphs tend to be quite noisy and I’m contemplating showing a smoothed out curve going forward.
The above graph is a closer look at just July for Google Search results. We can see some decent progress where at the start of the month I was getting at most under 20 clicks and as the month nears a close we were approaching the 30 per month daily figure more often. Hopefully we’ll get to 800-1000 monthly clicks in August.
To me this is the most important part of our progress, as it is indicative of SEO growth. If we can keep growing 30% month over month that would be amazing.
Google Search Console – Google Discover Results
Google Discover results are one of the more frustrating aspects of monitoring our traffic so far. It’s mostly frustrating because our June results were so good at 1.2k monthly clicks and this month we went down to under 400. More frustrating is that for most declines I have a reasonable idea on the reason, but in this case I’m in the dark.
Our method of posting has been similar from month to month. Google Discover seems to be favouring our more recent posts so far, so our frequency of posting declining should have some impact but not this significant. We did see a similar dip to 0 at the start of July and then a slight recovery, so hopefully it’s all just variance.
The table below tries to look at the numbers in a few different ways. The total number of Google Search clicks is up considerable in July (33%) along with overall impressions. The number of queries getting over 50 impressions is also up, but number of queries with at least 5 clicks is down.
Google Discover clicks are down nearly 70% and the total impressions are down nearly 65%. For June Google Discover made up 74% of the total Google traffic (Search+Discover) but this figure is down to 40% in July.
Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for July 2021
Instagram is still our biggest social platform at 1722 followers at the end of July. Our Pinterest focus has been slowing the past month or so as we’ve been seeing very minimal results for the time being put in. We’ll need to consider if Pinterest is where we want our time to be spent moving forward, as we’re only seeing about 40 clicks registered on Google Analytics from Pinterest.
Facebook efforts have also slowed significantly in the summer months. We have been participating in a lot less food blogger/blogger groups and overall FB traffic has also come down significantly. At the peak we had around 530 FB sessions in a month and that is down to nearly half at 270.
Food Blog Income Report for July 2021 – Expenses and Revenues
Big Win Of the Month: Got our expenses as low as possible!
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.
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.
Finally we’ve had a month with no one time expenses. Hopefully that’s a sign that what we’ve got can sustain us moving forward for some time.
Recurring Expenses: $24.95
For July we made no new purchases and our only expenses are our running monthly expenses (MasterClass Education and Jetpack Backup)
Lessons Learned Regarding Expenses/Spending
Lesson for the month: It’s hard to learn much when we didn’t spend much!
Revenue from July 2021
TOTAL REVENUES: $1.71
Revenues from Amazon were half of where they were in June, but the amounts are negligible. It’s becoming clear that we need to put more effort into gaining revenues from other affiliate streams. This is tied to some of our short term goals that we keep missing.
Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals
Short Term Goals:
Time is apparently NOT on our side. The Summer is so busy and our ability to put time towards the blog will only slow further as we have some vacation time planned for August. Hopefully once September settles in and winter approaches we will get back to more consistent efforts.
As of now our main short term goal is to enjoy the summer and time with our kids. If there’s one short term goal I would like to focus on, it’s writing an affiliate post for one of the services we use and truly believe in.
Long Term Goals:
No movement has been made on our long term goals yet. I’m debating whether we have the time to exploring selling templates and I’m unsure if the ROI on those would warrant the time. Still to be determined.
Thank you for taking the time to visit our Food Blog and Income Report. You can start at the beginning of our financial blogging journey from March 2021:
Month 1: March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 474 / Profit -$2,236 (Q1)
Month 2: April 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1138 / Profit -$1,077
Month 3: May 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 1708 / Profit -$859
Month 4: June 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report – Sessions 2489 / Profit -$73.30
I find your July monthky food blog income and food blog traffic report very informative and useful. I like your short term and long term goals. It is great to see how you are using the available data to plan the next steps. Great job!
Thank you so much Hadassah! I’m glad you find the goals useful, even though we’re not hitting many at this point!
I love reading your monthly reports! You are so far ahead of where I was at the same point in my blogging journey. One really good thing I see from your Google Organic search results is that your click-through rate is nearly 2%, which is a good number. One of these days, I’ll try again with a photo for FoodGawker. That seems to be giving you a very good ROI of your time. Thanks so much for sharing your progress with this July monthly income and traffic report.
Thank you so much for the comment Lisa! I don’t have a great perspective on click through rates, so that’s helpful to know that hovering around 2% is good! I agree that foodgawker is a good ROI, and even on submissions that get rejected it’s at least a quick submission process.
Thank you so much for sharing your monthly report! As a new blogger (I started in May) it is so encouraging to see how well you are doing and seeing realistic numbers! I know this is a long game but we will get there! I think it is important for newer bloggers to share and see other income reports that are close to theirs, it keeps spirits up because most often you see income reports showing high numbers and thousands of dollars made!
Thank you so much for the comment. Also I agree, that was definitely my motivation. While it’s nice to see bloggers making so much money and having so much traffic, it doesn’t help assessing what can be accomplished if you start in 2021. Thanks for the encouragement, I agree we’ll get there!
So sorry to hear about the decline on your food blog. I am sure future months will be much better.
I really enjoyed reading your July income and traffic report. It really shows how things can differ from one month to the next. Even though you didn’t work on your long-term goals I wouldn’t give up on them just yet, you will find time to work on them and you’ll be glad they were still on that list when you do get to them. As for your short-term goals, I personally hit very few of my own goals in July, it happens sometimes. I love that your August goal is to enjoy the summer, something a lot of us forget to do when we have lots to get done.
Thank you for sharing your monthly report. It is very helpful information. You are very thorough and I learned a lot.
This is amazing. I need to start writing down my monthly reports. I currently don’t. These types of blogging reports are so encouraging and its great to see progress and ways that you can improve your blog. Thanks for sharing.
that bot traffic is really annoying have you tried to block it in the GA admin? Or I just missed it out that you did. Im new to foodgawker that a friend introduced to me and its nice to get traffic from there too.
Thanks for sharing your report. I believe when google does an update, it seems to make numbers go up and down. I’ve experienced the same. I love to read how different sites are doing each month.