Hook Rate / Thumbstop

Hook rate, also called thumbstop, is the share of people who stop to watch in the first few seconds of your video, commonly figured as 3-second video plays divided by impressions.

You spend hours on a video ad, load it up, and stare at the sales number wondering why it is flat. Hook rate looks at a different moment: the split second when the video appears and the person either keeps scrolling or stops. If almost nobody stops, nothing else in the video matters, because they never saw it. That is why so many marketers pull this metric first when they are trying to work out whether a creative is dead on arrival or just losing people later.

Worth knowing: this is not a column Meta hands you by default. Hook rate is an industry diagnostic that you build yourself as a custom metric in Ads Manager, usually by dividing 3-second video plays by impressions. Definitions wobble a little from one team to the next, so when you compare notes with someone, check you are both measuring the same thing before you argue about whose number is better.

The honest catch is that a strong hook rate is not a sale. If lots of people stop but few buy, your opener is doing its job of grabbing attention while grabbing the wrong attention, pulling in people who were never going to purchase. It measures whether you interrupted someone, not whether you convinced them. Treat it as a signal about your first three seconds, not a target to max out for its own sake, or you will end up with the most scroll-stopping ad that sells nothing.

Stopping the wrong crowd is still stopping the wrong crowd.