Hook rate
Definition
The share of people who keep watching the first few seconds of your video ad after it shows up. It tells you if your opening stops the scroll.
Aron VeraartUpdated Hook rate tells you how good the first seconds of your video are. Not the whole video, just the opening. People scroll fast, and if those first seconds don't give them a reason to stay, the rest of your video doesn't matter at all, nobody sees it.
It's not an official metric you'll find with that name in every ad platform, it's something marketers calculate themselves. On Meta, most people use the 3-second video plays from Ads Manager for it.
For job ads this matters a lot, because the person you want is a job scroller. They weren't looking for a job. So opening with your logo or "We're hiring!" usually loses them. Opening with something they recognize from their own work, a question about their current situation, or the salary, has a much better chance.
How to calculate it
Take the number of people who watched at least the first 3 seconds and divide it by the number of impressions. Multiply by 100 for a percentage.
Example
A company tests two versions of the same video for a CNC operator job. Version A opens with the company logo and "Join our team". Version B opens with a close-up of a machine and the line "Still working night shifts for the same pay?". Same video after the first seconds. Version B gets a clearly higher hook rate, so that's the opening they keep.