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A previous Dog Walkers Melbourne cats article looked at the whole cats online market (Google searches) for three main countries of Australia, America and UK.

The following information relates to long term trends (2006 to 2010) for the main cat category (CATS). It must be noted that the raw growth data from Google is measured against the whole of the Google search market growth. This means that while growth rates are low, they are relative to the growth rate of all Google searches, which may be fairly high.

The graph to the right shows the seasonality in the cat search trends for Australia and America over the years 2006 to 2010. The rest of this article analyses what this trend may mean for cat lovers.

AUSTRALIA  LONG TERM CATS TREND

You can see that except for 2010 that there is a seasonal trend for the main growth to occur in the middle of the year between May and September with peaks often in these two months. The start and end of the year tend to be the lowest search volumes.

This trend is almost the reverse of the search seasonality shown for the DOGS term. ‘Dogs’ has its highest volume searches in January and December with a trough (up and down perturbations) in the middle of the year. It was considered that this may be due to the Christmas effect of people buying puppies at Christmas, however that effect does not explain the ‘cats’ seasonality.

As the majority of Australia’s population is urban and concentrated in the southern states the middle of the year represents a significant weather change in Australia (a definite change to cool weather winters). It could be that people in Australia purchase more cats or have more involvement in searching for information about cats in the middle of the year, because both they and the cats are more likely to be inside houses at this time of year.

This five year average trend shows a slight growth average over the five years of around 3% on top of the total Google search market growth. This is slightly in excess of the population and CPI growth, which is expected for a mature market. Note for the graphs below the vertical axis scales is NOT the same.

AMERICA  LONG TERM CATS TREND

For america its anomolous year was in 2007. The reason that this line is so much higher than the others is that the January search value was suppressed for some reason in that year, meaning that all of the subsequent months appeared to have much higher relative growth.

Unlike Australa which has an almost symmetrical seasonal growth trend of CATS searches, America’s growth trend seems to cycle like a sine wave. That is it dips early in the year around Feb/March,  has a small peak May to July, before a pronounced dip in September and October, before cycling up again in December. Removing 2007 from the data, it would appear that American’s search for information on CATS would still be around 1 to 2 % growth over the year, above the Google all search trend (for the five year average).

Unlike Australia, the American Cats and Dogs long term trends show very similar seasonal shapes to each other. It is noted that ‘DOGS’ also had an anomoly year in 2007, suggesting that perhaps this may be a systematic Google error, rather than freak growth rates for both cats and dogs in the one year. Note for the graphs below the vertical axis scales is the same.

Cats Long term CONCLUSIONS

While the previous articles absolute total cats industry trends showed important informaton and can be compared to absolute ownership rates etc, this articles growth trends show important information about how the market behaves seasaonly. Which is important if you want to know about cat trends or you are in the cat business.

It shows that while America’s Cats and Dogs growth trend over the last five years were very similar, that Australia showed a very different cat growth trend, which was also very different to its dog gorwth trend graph.  America’s cats trend dipped early in the year, went into a small rise, then another trough before finishing the year slightly up at the end.

In Australia the cats seasonal trend for each of the five years showed most interest in cats saerches in the middle eight months of the year (winter), and the lowest points being in Januray and December.

In America the strongest long term trend for people searching specifically for CATS was in May through to September (summer), with the highest volume of searches in these two specific months.

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