Hook rate and thumb stop

What hook rate is

Hook rate is the percentage of people who see a video ad and keep watching past its opening seconds, usually measured at the 3-second mark. It answers one narrow question: did the first moment of the ad stop someone from scrolling past it. Some teams use the term “thumb-stop ratio” for the same idea, since it describes the moment a thumb stops mid-scroll on a phone.

Hook rate is not the same as watch time or completion rate. A video can have a strong hook and still lose most of its viewers by the midpoint. Hook rate only measures the opening.

How it is measured

Hook rate is calculated as 3-second video views divided by impressions (or by reach, depending on how a platform reports it), expressed as a percentage. On Meta, the metric for this is 3-Second Video Plays. Do not confuse it with ThruPlay: ThruPlay counts a much later threshold (a view of 15 seconds or the full video, whichever comes first), so it measures whether people stayed, not whether the opening hooked them.

Hook rate = (3-second views ÷ impressions) x 100

There is no single universal benchmark because it varies by format, placement, and audience, but within a single account, hook rate is comparable across your own ads. Track it relative to your own history and your own past winners, not against numbers from unrelated industries.

Why it matters

Feed placements are built around continuous scrolling. An ad has a fraction of a second to interrupt that motion before someone moves on. Hook rate is the earliest and cheapest signal available on whether a creative is doing that job. It shows up in the data well before conversion numbers do, which makes it useful for cutting losing ads early and saving spend.

A low hook rate usually caps everything downstream. If people don’t stop, they don’t watch the pitch, and they don’t click. No amount of a good offer in the back half of a video fixes a weak opening.

How to read and act on it

Compare hook rate across ads in the same test round, using the same placement mix, since hook rate differs by placement (Reels tends to behave differently from Feed). When one ad’s hook rate is meaningfully below the others, treat the opening moments as the problem, not the whole video.

Common fixes: open on the product or the result immediately instead of a slow build, use a text overlay or spoken line that names the problem in the first line, avoid logos or brand intros before anything else happens, and test different visual openers (a face, a bold claim, motion) on the same script.

Common mistakes

Judging hook rate on too little spend, before enough impressions exist to be reliable. Comparing hook rate across different placements or aspect ratios as if they were the same test. Assuming a strong hook rate guarantees a winning ad. It only tells you the opening worked, not that the offer or the pitch that follows will hold up.

How YieldBI helps

YieldBI surfaces hook rate alongside cost and conversion data for every creative, so a weak opening shows up within the first day of spend instead of waiting for a full attribution window to catch it.