Thumbstops are a relatively new metric in the advertising world, with the onset of social media marketing.

In Facebook ads and other content driven platforms, a lot of testing needs to be done to find out what’s hooking your audiences in to watch your ads.

So what is a Thumbstop Rate?

Thumbstop Rate is a metric that allows us to measure the efficiency of the hook.

The hook, meaning the first 3 seconds of your video is crucial to grabbing people’s attention and getting them to watch your ad.

With a weak hook, you probably aren’t achieving much efficiency in terms of getting your audiences to watch your ads.

What Thumbstop Rate does is it allows you to see which hooks are working more effectively. This information will help you while you develop feedback loops to make the best creative possible.

In the Facebook Ads platform, Thumbstop Rate is a custom metric, meaning you have to create it yourself and then you can add it into your columns using the Customize Columns option. You can create a custom column preset and combine this with other soft metrics like Cost Per Outbound Click and CTR.

The formula for Thumbstop Rate is:

3-second video plays / Impressions.

Make sure to turn it into a percentage before you click save!

My advice with this metric is to always understand and remember that there is more to an ad than just the hook.

For example, let’s say you had a better Thumbstop Rate on Ad x but better conversion rate from Ad y. It may be a good idea to combine the effective hook and the video that has generated better conversions, to make Ad z and test that.

Hope this helps!