May 8, 2022

Food Blog Income Report March 2022

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One year after our first traffic and income report we’ve experienced almost 1000% growth in sessions, and even larger gains in our google clicks.

Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for March 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 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 gain more insights into our first month with year over year data!

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 continued our slow pace with only 4 new posts and finished the month with a total of 114 blog posts. In addition to posts we continued creating Google Web stories and this month we created 2 google web stories.

Users Overview for March 2022

The top channel breakdown for March remains consistent from February, with 87% of users coming from Organic and 8% from Direct.

The total number of users grew consistently into March at 8%, and Organic users growth slowed somewhat from 12% to 8% this month. This slowing was offset by strong Social user growth at 53%.

Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for March 2022

Our sessions per user and pages/session are up slightly in March, at 1.12 and 1.13 respectively (up from 1.10 and 1.12). The average session duration slightly increased to 34 seconds, but our bounce rate also unfortunately increased and sits at 92.18% (up from 91.7%). I’m not sure what is standard here but it feels as though we aren’t keeping people on the website that well once they visit a page from organic searches.

Total sessions had strong growth again, with a solid 10% increase up to 5834 sessions. Similarly Page Views grew by 11% and finished the month at 6569. All of our other metrics in the chart below remained fairly consistent with a slight increase of mobile users from 75% to 76%.

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

The chart above is a good breakdown of source by source traffic, with the top 5 sources of traffic being consistent from February into March.

Pinterest experienced very strong growth in March at 83% with Facebook following behind at 30% growth. The growth in both of these areas supported the strong growth in Social traffic that was mentioned previously.

Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for March 2022

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

Google Search Console – Search Results

The above graph is a glimpse of our Google Search results (not including Discover) over the last 12 months. From this graph we can see that we’re now averaging about 160 clicks per day, but the traffic appears to be leveling off somewhat.

The above graph is a closer look at just March for Google Search results. Throughout the month we were steadily getting around over 150 clicks per day.

In addition to clicks, our average position declined slightly from 14.4 to 14.9, but our average CTR improved up from 2.9% to 3.3% in March.

Google Search Console – Google Discover Results

Google Discover results were down significantly from February, down 28% to 620 clicks. The main reason for this decline was a significant drop in Google Web Story clicks this month from last month.

Google Web Stories

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In March we continued creating Google Web stories that link out to some of our historical recipe posts, but only created 2 in March vs 3 last month. With these 2 stories we had 630 web story sessions which is 315 per web story, consistent from the 320 we experienced last month. Google Web stories help 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 great 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.

As mentioned above we had 630 sessions to our web stories, but across our web stories we had only 78 clicks to our blog. This is significantly less clicks than the 508 last month and our click through rate in March was much lower at 12% instead of 53% in February.

Despite declines in Google Web Story results this month (largely due to simply not creating enough web stories), our Google Search clicks increased well by 20% up to 4722 and our total impressions increased by 5%.

Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for March 2022

We did not manage to revive our social media presence this month, and our IG followers continued to decline, falling another 16. Pinterest and FB continue to grow slowly with minimal effort.

Year Over Year Results: March 2021 to March 2022

Despite blogging for a bit over a year, our first income and traffic report came in March of 2021, so this is the first month we’ve been able to do a year over year assessment. These year over year comparisons will likely be more relevant a year from now as these first few will have huge growth numbers due to the low starting points, but it’s still interesting to see how far we’ve come anyhow.

In March 2022 our total blog posts are 293% larger than where they were in March of 2021 (114 vs 29). This is a good starting metric because we could assume that many of our results (traffic or users) should or could be proportional to blog posts. Instead we saw 589% growth in page views, 978% growth in sessions and 1571% growth in users, all far pacing the growth of blog posts. In addition to this, we had very low google clicks a year ago (20), so our total clicks grew immensely at 23510% growth up to 4722 clicks. We look forward to doing these year over year comparisons in each post moving forward.

An amazing goal would be to maintain this sessions growth level of around 900% which would bring us over 50,000 sessions by next year and into Mediavine territory. Unfortunately with our blog post output lately this will likely be tough, but it’s good to have goals!

Year over Year Results Comparison - March 2022

Food Blog Income Report for March 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.

Profit results were fairly similar to last month with the only difference being $0.49 in Amazon revenue instead of $0 from last month. All expenses remained the same.

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 March 2022

TOTAL REVENUES: $0.49

Unfortunately we only made $0.49 revenue from Amazon this month and nothing from any other streams either.

Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals

Short Term Goals

This month we’re actively stating that there will be no new short term goals. My wife and I have a lot of personal activity ongoing, especially with our jobs that is preventing us from putting in as much time as we would like in the blog. This is reflective in our total post count dropping over the last number of months.

Long Term Goals:

No new goals here.