We wanted to find out which pets are the most popular in the USA and across the world. To find this out, we turned to search data gathered using Google Keyword Planner. We first built lists of cat breeds, dog breeds, and other pets to compare against one another. We then created usable search terms from these names before downloading the search data. The data we collected was for the last 12 months to July 2021, which was the most recently available data at the time.
For the US cities, we found data for the 30 most populated places according to Wikipedia. For the country comparisons, we collected data from all EU, G20, and OECD countries.
By looking at search data for the past year, we were able to see which animals were searched for the most in different parts of the world, revealing the most popular pets.
We also wanted to find out which pets had experienced the greatest increase in popularity, so we took search data for each term from July 2019 and July 2021, and compared the % difference between the two figures. Those with a higher % change increased in popularity the most, while those with lower or negative % differences increased the least, or even dropped in popularity.
Additionally, we wanted to compare how much the different breeds of cats and dogs cost, so we could find out which were the most expensive. To do this, we used data from Cats.com for cats and PetBudget for dogs.