The metrics that decide whether an ad stays or goes
Defined by people who use them to spend money, not by a dictionary. Each one includes the formula, why it matters in a live account, and — the part usually missing — what it does not tell you.
All terms
Hook rate
The share of people who were served your video and stayed past the opening seconds.
Thumbstop ratio
Another name for hook rate: how often the ad stopped the scroll.
Hold rate
The share of people who stayed to the end once the ad had hooked them.
Retention curve
The graph of how many viewers are still watching at each second of the ad.
Creative fatigue
The decline in an ad's performance as the audience sees it repeatedly.
Frequency
The average number of times each person saw your ad in a given window.
Reach
The number of distinct people who saw the ad at least once.
CPM
The cost of a thousand impressions.
CPC
The average cost of one click.
CTR
The share of impressions that produced a click.
CPA
What one conversion cost you.
ROAS
Revenue produced per unit of ad spend.
MER
Total revenue divided by total ad spend, ignoring attribution entirely.
AOV
The average value of one order.
Conversion rate
The share of visitors who completed the action you wanted.
Learning phase
The period after a change while the platform's delivery system is still calibrating.
Attribution window
How long after seeing or clicking an ad a conversion still gets credited to it.
Incrementality
The conversions that happened because of the ad, rather than alongside it.
A/B test
A comparison where one variable changes and everything else is held constant.
Dynamic creative
Letting the platform assemble combinations from a pool of assets and copy.
UGC
User-generated content: ads shot to look like a real person's own footage.
AI UGC
UGC-format ads where the presenter or the footage is generated rather than filmed.
Spec ad
An ad made for a brand that has not commissioned it, usually to win the work.
Safe zone
The part of a vertical video the platform's own interface will not cover.
Aspect ratio
The shape of the video frame, written as width to height.
Captions
On-screen text carrying the spoken content of the ad.
See the formats these metrics rank
Six creative formats scored against their own account's average, across twelve live accounts.