I love cats and dogs, and as you know from this site I pet sit for both animals. So in an attempt to understand more about what people look for in cats, this article shows the results of the research and analysis on Google trends for all things that people search for related to Cats. Google is used for the analysis because of it being the most visited search engines in most countries in the world.

The top five cat related terms in Australia in early 2011 are: cats, cat, kittens, cat games, ragdoll cats. To See the other major searches in Australia as well as America and the UK, please read on.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SEARCHING FOR IN CATS ASSOCIATED TERMS

Firstly it is a good idea to compare Australia, America and the UK because these are some of the biggest CATS search countries globally.

Below you can see that the term ‘cats’ (Australia 18,100 monthly searches, USA, 246,000, UK 90,500) and ‘cat’ are the top monthly volume searches in each country, followed closely by the term ‘kittens’.  Specific cat breeds also rate highly with the highest breeds searched in Australia being (ragdoll cats volume 4400, Burmese cats 1900; Bengal cats 1900), the top three breeds in America searches are (bengal cat 33,100; Siamese cats 22000; ragdoll cats 18100) in the UK the top three breeds are (Bengal cats 9900; ragdoll cats 8100; Siamese cats 6600).

While ‘cat games’,’ cat pictures’ and ‘cat videos’ are also popular in America and Australia, the UK has a similar trend as it does for dog searches, with their cat humane societies ranking three times in the top ten ‘cat associated’ searches (cats protection 33,100; cat protection 9900; and cats protection league 9900). This is in keeping with the statistic that in 2007 “Over a quarter (27%) of the UK’s pets were bought or acquired from an animal welfare or rescue centre compared to 20% from a pet shop.”

TOP 15 'CATS associated' searches in Australia, America, UK (GOOGLE - Jan 2011)

CATS ASSOCIATED VOLUMES SEARCHED

The above tables give an indication of the kinds of volumes people are using to search for specific cat terms. To give an indication of the total cat associated market volumes the following table shows the  absolute volumes for the whole cat markets, by each month. Note that the data needed to be filtered considerably to generate this table removing terms such as ‘Cat Stevens’ and ‘Cats musical’.

While this table shows the absolute volumes, it does not give a ‘feel’ for the data, to do this graphing is always recommended. But to understand how this relates to other searches it is instructive to compare it to the total DOGS associated search volumes over the same period.

The three graphs below show the three countries graphs with Dogs and cats total market data plotted together. Besides the different seasonal variations of some of them (particularly Australia cats and dog differences) you will notice that each graph requires the CATS data to be multiplied by a number greater than ONE to be able to represent the cats data clearly with dogs data on one graph. This means in each case, that ‘cats’ searches in each country are significantly less than dogs searches. The multiplying factors for CATS associated data are: America cats x  2.0;  Australia x 1.5; UK Cats x  2.8

CATS Ownership statistics

To understand why ‘cats’ searches are so much lower than ‘dogs’  searches, it is useful to consider cats and dogs ownership rates in each country.

To further understand search patterns, the ratio of ‘cats to dogs search volumes’ is divided by the ratio of ‘cats to dogs ownership’.

You would expect search volumes to be related to specific pet ownership. The more dogs for instance, the more searches people might have on them.

The Dog to Cat Search multiplier to Ownership ratio of US and UK are quite similar 2.2 V 2.8, while Australia’s value is 0.9.

It appears that this is because while Australia has significantly more dogs than cats, people search for dogs at the same rate that they search for information on cats. This may seem logical however the US and UK stats are quite different to this ratio. In these countries the number of dogs and cats are nearly the same however they search for information on dogs almost twice as much as they do cats.

The difference in these statistics may be that people have more involvement with their dogs (because they can take them out or use them on farms etc) or that the ownership ratio per house is different.

For instance in the USA (2007) while 43 million households owned dogs (1.7 dogs per house) only 37 million households owned cats (2.2 cats per house). In Australia (2007) 40% of houses owned dogs while only 26% owned cats. So the search rate is more affected by the number of households that own a dog or a cat, rather than just the individual dog or cat populations.

In Jan 2011 the ratio of searches for the total cat market, America to Australia was 1.27M : 111,000 = 11.4  Yet America to Australia population ratio is 307 M / 22 M = 14. This means that per capita Australia searches more for information on cats than America does.

CONCLUSIONS

All three countries have a relatively high cat involvmenet (both in ownership numbers and total searches for cat information.).

Australia and America have very similar search terms in the top fiften volume cat searches while UK has a more humane slant on its searches – backed up by its high ownership from cat welfare homes.

The seasonality trend for the total market is similar for America and the UK in that both for Dogs and cats there is a trough in the middle of the year, June/ July.  Unlike the other countries, Australia dog and Cat search volume graphs show quite different shapes to each other (at least in the second quarter of the year. The cats search trend still has a dip in July but peaks on either side around May and August.

The ‘dogs to cats Search volume’ ratio TO ‘dogs and cats ownership’ ratio for America and UK are similar around mid 2’s while Australia’s ratio is near one. This is because while australia has considerably more dogs than cats, they don’t search for dogs relatively as much as America and  UK do. This difference could be atributed to ownership per household rates, cultural differences, or the types of terms searched for dogs or cats throughout the total market.

While this article looks at the main cat assocated terms and the total market volumes, it does not show the long term trend fo r cats, this is shown in the next article.

Article by Bruce Dwyer. If you wish to use any of this information please refer to the article as a reference and provide a link to http://www.dogwalkersmelbourne.com.au