Guide
Hook rate is the percentage of viewers who watch past the first 3 seconds of your video ad. It's the metric that decides whether the rest of your ad gets seen at all.
Hook rate = 3-second video views ÷ impressions × 100. If 10,000 people were served your ad and 2,800 watched at least 3 seconds, your hook rate is 28%. Ad platforms report the ingredients under slightly different names — TikTok and Meta both expose 3-second views (sometimes labeled as thumb-stop ratio in third-party dashboards).
Rules of thumb: under 20% means your opening is being swiped like wallpaper; 20–30% is workable; 40%+ is strong creative. Treat these loosely — placement, audience temperature, and format all shift the baseline. The comparison that actually pays is internal: hook A versus hook B on the same audience. Differences of 2x between variants of the same ad are common, which is why testing openings is the highest-leverage edit in paid social.
Hook rate is a post-spend metric — you buy the impressions, then find out the hook failed. The pre-spend equivalent is Hook Strength: PreTestAds predicts viewer engagement across your first 3 seconds from the creative itself, so you can compare openings before any budget is committed. Score your variants, launch the winner, and let the platform's real hook rate confirm what the prediction already told you. The full approach is covered in how to write a TikTok hook and ad pre-testing.
A great hook with a dead middle still doesn't convert — viewers who stop scrolling at second 2 can still leave at second 9, long before your CTA. That's why the full engagement curve matters: where attention drops, and whether it's still alive during your offer (see why ads don't convert). And before the hook even plays, the still that represents your ad does the first round of work — picking the best thumbnail for video ads is the same attention problem one frame earlier.
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