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Food Blog Income Report and Food Blog Traffic Report numbers for May 2021. Learn how we achieved over 1700 sessions and 223% Google Organic Growth in just our third month!
Welcome to Cooking with Carbs’ monthly Food Blog Income Reports. Today’s post will be the Food Blog Income and Blog Traffic Report for May 2021. Most of the 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 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 -$2,236.59 (Q1)
Continue reading to learn how we passed 1700 sessions and 420 Google Organic Sessions in our Third Full 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 Audience Overview, Users Overview, and Traffic Source/Medium 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 13 posts and finished the month with a total of 55 blog posts.
Users Overview for May 2021
The top channel breakdown for May 2021 is very similar to that of April 2021. Social traffic continues to be the largest driver of traffic, followed by Direct and Organic Search.
The image below compares our April 2021 and May 2021 User Overview numbers. April experienced a significant gain in users compared to April (58% gain, up to 1138). This overall gain was driven by a large boost in Organic Users, increasing by 463% from 51 users to 287.
In addition to growth in Organic users we also experienced a 65% growth in Direct users and 53% in Social users. As we will see later the majority of the Social user growth is coming from Facebook.
Blog Traffic Report: Audience Overview for May 2021
I’m not sure what we expected when we started this blog a few months ago. I would have likely been quite happy with 1700 sessions after 3 full months (which is where we’re at now!) and I also probably would have assumed that Pinterest was carrying the load with Google lagging behind. As we’ll learn in this section, that assumption would have been very wrong!
With 1708 sessions in May, we experienced 55% growth month over month and 46% growth in total page views at 2503. Average session duration is up this month at 1min 45s (from 1min 25s), which is somewhat surprising as I would have expected the traffic from FB groups to bring this down.
Unfortunately bounce rate continues to go up and now sits at 72.8% (from 68.4%), again likely a product of continued marketing and social sharing in FB groups which results in a lot of visits, but also possibly short visits that end in bouncing off the site.
In previous posts we had shared that our mobile user % seemed low compared to other bloggers experiences and the numbers are slowly trending in a direction we’d expect, with total mobile users now making up 59% (up from 46% last month). The total number of new users is also coming down (91% from 96%) which I would expect as a blog ages and it gets more repeat users.
Food Blog Traffic Report: All Traffic Source/Medium for May 2021
The table above clearly shows that Facebook referral traffic is leading the way at 530 sessions. The vast majority of this traffic is currently coming form FB groups, so this figure will likely be hitting a plateau after some growth into June I suspect.
The distribution of traffic changed somewhat this month, as Direct traffic and Facebook traffic both grew significantly (56% and 70% respectively) and so they still accounted for the top two sources of traffic.
Foodgawker was the third biggest source in April, however I mentioned in April that I felt that the ~250 sessions in a month from Foodgawker was likely on the high end. As we moved forward into May that was indeed the case as that number dropped down to 190 sessions.
Google Organic search traffic experienced the largest growth at 223% and will likely be the first or second largest source of traffic in June if the trends continue.
Pinterest traffic remains low at 57%, but it does continue to grow slowly with 27% growth in May.
Google Search Console Report: Search Query Analysis for May 2021
In this section we will explore the Google Search Console Search Results and starting this month we will also look at the Google Discover results.
Google Search Console – Search Results
The above image makes me happy. It is an image of the total clicks and total impressions over the last 3 months via the Google Search Console platform. On a day to day basis the numbers fluctuate a fair bit, but when you zoom out on a 3 month timeframe you can easily see that the graph is trending in the right direction. I’m looking forward to see how our google performance plays out in the next few months.
The above image is a closer look at the number of clicks and impressions in May alone. In May we had 169 clicks compared to 50 in April, with a maximum number of clicks in a day at 13 (vs 6 in April) and maximum daily impressions at 683 (vs. 132 in April).
We are currently ranking as “number 1” in many slots in these Search Query results, but that result is somewhat (very?) misleading. For MANY different search queries we have a result that is showing up in the Recipes Image drop down at the top of Page 1. I believe any result in this section will show up as 1 ranking even if the image is 100th in the list.
That being said, we are legitimately on Page 1 for several different search queries as well, which is exciting! I would have originally assumed that it would take 6-8 months to get onto Page 1.
Google Search Console – Google Discover Results
What is Google Discover?
What is Google Discover? Maybe I’m behind the curve but I had no idea what this was until I noticed we were getting clicks from it…. and a lot of clicks at that!
You can learn more about what Google Discover is here, but it is effectively a personalized feed when mobile users search on the google homepage. Google will show these mobile users content that it deems is relevant tot them.
I’ve been staring at Google Search Console Search results for a few months now, willing them to go up. Imagine my surprise when I discover (pun intended?) the Google Discover section in Google Search Console and then realize that the number of clicks on Google Discover is 73% larger than those from Google Search.
The Good: More Google Clicks! The Bad: Google Discover seems unpredictable, inconsistent and hard to plan for. For now I will view this as an added bonus to anything from the search results. That being said, you can somewhat optimize your page for Google Discover, with the main additional work for most people being that Google Discover requires images that are 1200 px wide.
The image above shows a high level breakdown of both Google Search and Google Discover results. At this time Google Discover makes up 63% of total Google Organic clicks.
I’m very happy with the Google Search results so far, with clicks up nearly 240% to 169 in May. We currently have 16 different search queries yielding over 50 impressions and 1 search query yielding over 5 clicks. I hope to track these items over time and plot these when I get more data. (Can you tell I love data?!)
Google Organic Results – Why are we succeeding so far?
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.
I should add a caveat. I haven’t studied many other bloggers early days google results, so I have no clue if the results we’re experience are truly good or not in the grand scheme. From what I’ve read and learned so far our results do seem strong for a 3 month old blog.
Keyword Analysis / SEO Research
The one thing we’re excelling at so far is SEO and Keyword research. Many bloggers don’t focus on this but I think it’s leaving a LOT of traffic on the table.
There are many Keyword Search tools out there, but we’re currently using one that seems to get mentioned less often than others, and it is called KWFinder by Mangools.
I would strongly recommend KWFinder based on our experience thus far. Our main method at this point is searching for keywords that have a low Keyword SEO difficulty and some reasonable monthly search volume (what is reasonable varies by the person).
At this point I can’t comment on the accuracy of the predicted search volume on their platform, but the Keyword SEO difficulty does seem very accurate. Any query we’re currently ranking well for was listed as low difficulty when we did the original search.
Any KW search software is expensive, and I feel new bloggers will feel it’s too steep or not necessary. I was the same. In fact my KW software is still my most expensive recurring expense thus far (~$300/yr as of June 2021). That being said, it is FULLY worth it. We would not be seeing the organic growth we’re seeing so far without it. 100%.
Ask yourself this: What good is spending hours on a blog post if nobody is going to search for it, find it and read it?
Blog Social Media Report: Social Media Breakdown for May 2021
Instagram continues to be the social platform with the largest following, at 1630 followers at the end of May. Our Pinterest account is much smaller but saw a nice 50% increase in followers over May.
Email subscriber uptick is slow, with only 5 new subscribers in May. We have completed our freebie (conversion charts) but have yet to integrate them into the homepage yet. Hopefully once we start offering the freebie we can compare the subscriber gains before and after the freebie.
Food Blog Income Report for May 2021 – Expenses and Revenues
Big Win Of the Month: Approval to the Amazon Associates Program!
I’m happy to report that we’ve successfully achieved our 3 qualified purchases for the Amazon Associates Program. We no longer have to worry about being kicked out and all of our amazon links no longer being functional!
One-Time Expenses: $795
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.
We continue to keep on trend with large monthly business related purchases. This month one of my computer monitors died and I desperately needed a good quality monitor that had good colour accuracy for food photography editing.
After a lot of research on various 27” monitors I landed on the BenQ PD2700 as the best balance between quality and price.
In addition to needing a new monitor we’ve also been dealing with poor to non-existent wifi in various locations in our house and the worst room in the house has been our kitchen. This is NOT the ideal room for poor wifi in a house trying to run a food blog! To solve this problem we purchased a TP-Link Deco Mesh Wifi system which has been working very well so far.
If we can tone down the large one time purchases our numbers would be looking a lot better, or at least a lot less bad.
Recurring Expenses: $69.05
WP Rocket – This is the new plugin of the bunch, and I cannot say enough good things about this plugin. I plan on doing a full post about website speed and our mobile/desktop site speed before and after using this plugin.
The motivation for getting this plugin was to address the multiple errors/poor URL warnings we were experiencing in the Google Search Console Page Experience and Core web vitals categories. As of last week the performance in these categories is now a ranking and SEO consideration for Google, and so we treated this as priority number 1 that needed to be addressed.
We were NOT disappointed with the performance of this plugin. Performance Spoiler: Our Google Page Insights desktop score went from 92 to 100 after using the optimized plugin and far more impressively our mobile score went from 58 to 92 after using the optimized plugin. This plugin singlehandedly fixed all of our Page Experience/Core web vitals issues, as well as significantly improving our site speed.
I promise you will NOT regret purchasing WP Rocket.
Jetpack Backup – We are using Jetpack Backup to backup our website daily, at a cost of $9.95/month.
Education – We subscribed to MasterClass due to the number of both cooking and photography courses. The courses are great. The only obstacle at this point is finding the time to watch them! This costs $15/month.
Lessons Learned Regarding Expenses/Spending
Lesson for the month: Sometimes you just need a plugin!
We knew we needed to improve our website speed to solve our various site speed/usability warnings from Google. The options were to either hire an expert or find an appropriate plugin. I first tried a free plugin which did fix some of the website speed issues, but ultimately we needed a paid plugin (WP Rocket) to resolve all of our issues. Sometimes you get what you pay for!
Revenue from May 2021 (How do food blogs make money?!)
TOTAL REVENUES: $4.99
Up to this point the only revenue stream we had setup was Amazon and so it is exciting that we completed our necessary 3 amazon purchases and managed to make $4.99 in commission while doing so.
At the moment we’re getting a reasonable number of amazon clicks, but they are not converting well at all. We will need to optimize amazon conversion rates in the future.
The revenue goal for this month is to diversify revenue streams by incorporating other affiliate programs that we believe in.
Food Blog Short Term and Long Term Goals
Short Term Goals:
We had a number of short term goals for May (4) and we accomplished 2 of them which isn’t so bad.
Goal status:
- We finished creating two digital conversion charts.
- We did NOT add the necessary popups to the site. I believe we may need to switch from MailChimp to another provider.
- We caught up on creating some pinterest pins, though now we’re behind in others.
- We still need to write a blog post about other affiliates
New June Goals:
- Write a blog post about WP Rocket and the site speed/performance improvement before and after using the plugin.
Long Term Goals:
We had a number of Long term goals for May (5) and we have no yet accomplished any of them, though improving SEO knowledge and Food Photography are both ongoing.
New Goals:
- I would like to do a study on Instagram Followers and methods of helping boost followers (both free and paid methods). There is likely a reasonable amount that could be paid to increase an IG following that yields a positive ROI.
We will continue posting these Food Blog Income Reports monthly. While you’re here please visit some of our other blogging articles or delicious food recipes! Thank you for taking the time to join us on our blogging journey!
You can start at the beginning of our financial blogging journey here:
March 2021 Food Blog Income Report and Traffic Report
