What is hook rate?

Hook rate is the share of a video ad's deliveries where the viewer stayed past the opening — thruplays divided by impressions. A thruplay is the platform's "watched meaningfully" event (typically 15 seconds, or the full video if shorter), so hook rate isolates one specific creative question: does the first moment stop the scroll? It exists only for video; image and carousel ads show no value.

Formula

hook rate = video thruplays ÷ impressions

Worked example

A video creative serves 200,000 impressions and logs 24,000 thruplays: hook rate 12%. A second creative for the same product hooks 4% on the same audience. Same offer, same targeting — the 3× gap is the opening three seconds, and it compounds: the platform's auction favours ads people watch, so a weak hook also buys more expensive impressions.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

fact_ad_performance stores platform-reported video_thruplays and impressions per creative per day. v_creative_performance sums both per creative over its whole run and divides; v_format_performance carries the format-level average on the Creatives tab, and the creative ranking repeats the per-creative figure. Downstream views null the value out for any creative whose format is not VIDEO — a hook rate on an image ad would be markup noise, and the views make it impossible. The stored value is a 0–1 ratio; the app displays it as a percentage.

Why it matters

Hook rate diagnoses where a video creative fails. Low hook rate with decent CTR from the survivors means the opening is the problem and the rest of the ad works — re-cut the first seconds, keep the body. A healthy hook rate with poor CTR means people watch and then don't care — the offer or the call to action is the problem. CTR alone cannot distinguish these two failure modes.

Common mistakes

• Comparing hook rate across placements. Feed, stories and reels auto-play differently, and sound-on defaults differ; compare within a placement or against the creative's own history.
• Optimizing the hook and never checking what follows. A clickbait opening can raise hook rate while attracting watchers who never buy — pair it with the creative's true ROAS in the ranking table.
• Reading platform thruplay definitions as identical. Each platform decides what counts as a thruplay; cross-channel comparison inherits those definitions.

Where you see this in the app

Marketing → Creatives, as the hook-rate column of the format table and the creative ranking (video creatives only).