Top Terms
Top Terms identifies the words and phrases that appear most often in your text responses. Use it to get a quick read on what respondents are talking about most, or to spot recurring themes before diving into more targeted analyses.
Adding a Top Terms analysis
Section titled “Adding a Top Terms analysis”- In the Workbench toolbar, click Top Terms.
- The Top Terms configuration panel opens. Work through the Options and Advanced tabs.
- Click Save to add the chart to your output library.
Options tab
Section titled “Options tab”Chart types
Section titled “Chart types”| Chart type | Best for |
|---|---|
| Column | Ranked vertical bar comparison of term frequency |
| Bar | Ranked horizontal bar comparison of term frequency |
| Lollipop | Ranked view with a cleaner, less cluttered layout than bars |
| Treemap | Showing relative frequency as proportional tiles |
| Word Cloud | Visual emphasis on the most frequent terms by size |
| Packed Bubble | Showing frequency as bubble size in a cluster layout |
Minimum mentions
Section titled “Minimum mentions”Set the minimum number of times a term must appear to be included in the chart. Increasing this threshold filters out rare terms and focuses the chart on the most significant themes.
Enable Use Dynamic Minimum Mentions to let the system calculate an appropriate threshold automatically based on your data. Turn it off to set a specific number manually.
Comparison options
Section titled “Comparison options”When Data Splits are applied:
- Combined — Shows term frequency across all data in a single chart
- Split — Breaks out term frequency by split category for side-by-side comparison
Advanced tab
Section titled “Advanced tab”Ignore list
Section titled “Ignore list”Words in the ignore list are excluded from the Top Terms chart entirely. Add terms that are too generic to be meaningful — for example, the name of your product, common survey instructions, or filler words your preprocessing hasn’t already removed.
- In the Advanced tab, type a term into the Ignore list field.
- Press Enter or click Add to add it to the list.
- To remove a term, click the × next to it.
Changes to the ignore list take effect immediately in the chart preview.
Metric property
Section titled “Metric property”Choose how term frequency is measured:
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Count | Total number of times the term appears across all responses |
| Percentage | The proportion of responses in which the term appears |
Percentage is often more useful when comparing across groups of different sizes — it normalises frequency so you can make fair comparisons between a segment of 50 respondents and one of 500.
Number of terms displayed
Section titled “Number of terms displayed”Set how many terms appear in the chart. The chart always shows the top-ranking terms up to this limit. The default is 25.
Frequently asked questions
Section titled “Frequently asked questions”Why do some obvious words not appear in my Top Terms chart?
Common stop words (and, the, is, etc.) are removed during preprocessing and will not appear. If a relevant term is missing, check whether it has been added to the ignore list, or whether the minimum mentions threshold is set too high.
What’s the difference between Top Terms and Diff Terms?
Top Terms shows the most frequently mentioned terms across your entire dataset (or across split groups). Diff Terms shows terms that are disproportionately associated with one category compared to another. Use Top Terms for volume; use Diff Terms for differentiation.
What is the difference between Count and Percentage?
Count shows how many times a term appears in total. Percentage shows what proportion of responses contain the term. If you’re comparing groups of different sizes, Percentage is usually the more meaningful measure because it accounts for the different base sizes.