Hook Rate

Hook rate is the share of a video ad's impressions that survive its opening — conventionally three-second views divided by impressions, the feed-platform definition of 'you stopped the scroll'. It is the creative-testing era's favorite leading indicator: fast to read, cheap to move, and honest about exactly one thing — whether the first seconds earned a pause — while promising nothing about what the pause is worth.

The measurement fine print first: platforms count the numerator differently (3-second views, ThruPlay-adjacent thresholds, 2-second viewable standards), so hook rate compares cleanly within a platform and treacherously across them; and the denominator is impressions as served, which makes hook rate sensitive to placement mix (Stories, Reels, and feed autoplay differently) and to audience (retargeting pools 'hook' on recognition alone — compare like against like or compare noise). What actually moves it is the craft the metric exists to test: opening on motion or a face mid-action rather than a logo, the first frame legible without sound (most feed video plays muted — captions and visual hooks carry it), pattern interrupts that defeat the feed's sameness, and front-loading the reason to care into frame one because 'setup' is a luxury the scroll doesn't grant. The strategic fine print is the entry's real lesson: hook rate is a TOP-OF-FUNNEL creative diagnostic, not a performance metric — the published analyses keep finding its correlation with conversion outcomes weak (a hook can stop everyone and qualify no one; curiosity-bait openers buy cheap pauses that never become customers), so the mature workflow uses it as a gate, not a goal: test openers on hook rate to find what stops the audience, then judge the stopped audience on HOLD-and-conversion evidence — CREATIVE-FATIGUE watching the decay, and the funnel's economics holding the verdict.

Hook rate matters wherever feed video is bought at scale — paid social creative testing, UGC pipelines, the iteration loops that produce dozens of openers per concept — as the cheapest first read on whether anyone stops. It matters most when treated as a gate in a sequence (hook to hold to conversion) and least when optimized as a goal, where it reliably breeds clickbait openers that win the pause and lose the economics. The discipline is platform-consistent definitions, like-for-like audience comparisons, sound-off-first creative, and the metric kept in its lane: it grades the first three seconds, and nothing else.

Hook rate is feed-video-era vocabulary - born when autoplay platforms standardized the 3-second view and creative teams needed a name for the opening's stop-rate; the term spread through paid-social practice in the early 2020s along with the testing pipelines it gates, and its limits became conventional wisdom the expensive way.

Etymology: source.

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Areas of marketing where hook rate is a core concern: