In this week’s SimplyMap blog post, we set out to discover which large US cities spend the most money per year on their pets. To find this out we used the variable, “Pets, Household Average” found in the consumer expenditure category in SimplyMap.

The national quantiles (by counties) in our legend ranged from a low of $190.35 to a high of $751.84. Using the “Create Ranking from Map” feature, we were presented with the following unfiltered results:

Creating a ranking report from a map using the US as the location will present county level data by default. Because we wanted to find larger US cities, we had to do two things: change the geography that the data was analyzed by, and create a population filter to show cities with a population greater than 100,000.

Changing How the Data is Analyzed

Changing the geographies of your ranking report is a simple two step process. First, select the “analyze data by” drop down menu and then select a new geographic unit. SimpyMap will present your new data immediately.

Creating and Applying a Filter

To create and apply a filter to only show cities with a population > 100,000:

Select “Data filters” then “Create new filter” from the top right of your screen.

At the filter creation screen, we used a recent variable # Population. We then set the condition to be greater than and typed in the value of 100,000. Lastly, we created a name and saved the filter.

Final Results Presented

Using the Display Options menu located near the top right of SimplyMap, we chose to hide results that did not meet our criteria of a city population greater than 100,000. The final results are below:

At a yearly average of $737.86, Highlands Ranch, CO ranks #1 in the United States in yearly average household spending on pets.

Stay tuned for more reports and SimplyMap tips & tricks!