A tag cloud, also known as word cloud or wordle, is a visual representation of the frequency of words in a text. Used to show qualitative data, tag clouds reveal the most prominent words in text data.
With the rise of text analysis over the last decade, tag clouds experienced a surge of their own since they are eye-catching and easy to create with online tools.
In fact, Flickr implemented word cloud visuals on their website so users could quickly tour the site via popular tags, coining the term tag clouds. Later on, they jokingly apologized to the UX community during their “Best Practices” Webby Award, by saying “sorry about the tag clouds.”
Tag cloud tools are for those starting out with text analysis and can be used to analyze all sorts of text data from online reviews and surveys, to emails, and social media interactions.
Let’s dive into several tag examples to help you understand how tag clouds can deliver valuable insights.
Tag Cloud Examples
Help Support Teams Spot the Most Common Customer Issues
SaaS companies receive numerous support/incident tickets from customers who need help.
With a tag cloud, your support team can immediately spot the topics customers are mentioning most often. This insight can lead to an in-depth analysis of the most frequently mentioned topics to see if there are updates or improvements that need to be made.
We created this tag cloud using Zoom reviews:
At a glance, the words meeting, screen sharing options, and Skype are most prominent. Other words worth noting are bad services, installation process, flawless streaming, technical issues, among others.
All of these words give insight into what your customers think and feel about your brand, which you can pass onto product and support teams so that they’re able to dig deeper into customer pain points.
Discover What Customers Need
Online reviews are a goldmine of information. They help you understand what your customers think and feel about your product/service. You can create a tag cloud of reviews to share internally, to send quick insights to product or marketing teams, and to highlight the features that customers use/mention most often.
For example, we created a tag cloud from Asana’s online reviews:
Here, you can immediately see that task and task management platform are mentioned most often, which makes sense. However, other words like awesome free program, team harmony, due date issues, tracking support tickets, and useful features, hint at what is and isn’t working.
Identify Areas of Improvement or Wins
When customers answer your surveys, the biggest source of insights can be found in their responses to open-ended questions. Here, they will tell you in detail what they like or don’t like about your product or service.
By creating a tag cloud from survey responses, you can easily gauge what features or product details your customers mention most. For example, in survey responses about Slack, customers often mention search features, search functionality, mobile app (among the more obvious words like chat, conversation, and group chat). This suggests that these features are important to customers, and they might need to be improved.
See the Results of a New Feature or Product Release
The feedback you receive after a new feature or product is launched is crucial to understand and address bugs, defects, issues, or celebrate a successful launch. Users who take to social media to express their opinions give you instant feedback.
You can create a tag cloud from online interactions that reference the new product or feature, and easily spot the frequency of key terms.
Here’s a tag cloud from a set of tweets about MailChimp and their newest feature: the Subject Line Helper.
The word features is most prominent. Looking at related words found in these reviews, like cool new features and shit features, it’s clear that customers are on the fence about MailChimp’s new feature.
Now that you know what you can do with tag clouds, let’s see the steps you need to perform to create your tag clouds
Create A Tag Cloud
There are several online tools you can use to create tag clouds in seconds.
But we recommend using MonkeyLearn’s Word Cloud Generator, a free tool that makes creating word clouds extremely easy in 4 simple steps. The tool is powered by AI, with advanced algorithms that will generate an accurate and insightful tag cloud.
To see how easy it is, follow this tutorial:
1. Upload your data
Type, paste or upload the text data you want to use to create your tag cloud. For this example, we are using Asana reviews from Capterra, copied and pasted into the tool.
2. Generate
Click on the ‘Generate Cloud’ button to visualize your results.
3. Customize
Personalize your tag cloud by changing theme, color, font, and set a word limit for your tag cloud. Additionally, you can edit the original text.
4. Download
Download your tag cloud in high-def .SVG, and .PNG images. Also, download your raw data in a .CSV file.
Your tag cloud is ready!
Final Words
Your company receives emails, social media interactions, survey responses, online reviews, and more, on a daily basis. Tag cloud creators give you the means to visualize that data and reveal popular words.
Have a go at creating your own with MonkeyLearn’s Word Cloud Tool.
Even though tag clouds are a great source of insights, they’re just a starting point for text analysis. MonkeyLearn also offers more advanced text analysis techniques, which can transform your insights into actionable data:
If you’re interested in performing some of these advanced techniques, sign up to MonkeyLearn for free and try our ready-to-use text analysis models.
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