What is Hook rate?

Hook rate is the percentage of impressions that result in a viewer watching the first three seconds of a video ad, calculated as three-second video views divided by impressions. It isolates one job: whether the opening frame stops a scroll.

Because it measures the top of the funnel independently of everything downstream, it is the fastest diagnostic in video creative — a video with a weak hook rate has been rejected before the message was ever heard, so fixing the script or the offer will not help. Typical benchmarks fall between 20 and 30 percent on Meta and higher on TikTok, where autoplay behaviour differs, but the absolute number matters less than the comparison between variants in the same account. Hook rate is usually read alongside hold rate, the share of viewers still watching at 15 seconds or to completion; the two together separate a video that fails to attract attention from one that attracts it and then loses it. What moves hook rate is almost entirely the first frame and the first spoken line: a face making eye contact, visible motion, an on-screen text promise, or the product already in frame rather than revealed later.