Improving creative decisions: How to use Meta and TikTok Ad Analytics

When running Meta or TikTok ads, it's important to keep a close eye on and analyze the performance of your creatives. This allows you to make well-founded decisions and effectively optimize your campaigns.

Meta and TikTok offer a range of analytics options that provide valuable insights into how your ads are performing. In this blog post, you'll learn everything you need to know about creative analysis.

Of course, when analyzing your creatives in your META/TikTok advertising account, the focus is on whether the conversions are profitable.

However, it is important to consider other aspects that influence the success of your creatives. This allows you to make targeted adjustments and improve the results of your ads.

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Primarily use these metrics to analyze your creatives

Thumb Stop OR Hook Rate Ratio: How good is the ad at stopping users from scrolling?
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Hold rate: Do users stay with the ad for longer than 3 seconds after the scroll stop?
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Cost per acquisition (CPA): That is the average cost per purchase.
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Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Shows how much revenue your ad generated per dollar spent.

Impressions: How often was your ad shown to users?

clicks: How often was your ad clicked?

Cost per click (CPC): That's the average cost per click on your ad.

Click-through rate (CTR): This is the ratio of clicks to impressions as a percentage. It shows how effective your ad is at getting people to click.

Average playback time: How long does a user watch the video?
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Now that you know the most important metrics to track, let's take a look at how to access and analyze the metrics.

If you want to know more about ad creative analysis, you should definitely our article Read about this.

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1. Thumbstop or Hook Ratio

The hook ratio for Meta or TikTok ads is a crucial metric for measuring the effectiveness of your creatives. It shows how good your creatives are at capturing your target audience's attention while scrolling. It counts how often a video was played for at least 3 seconds in relation to all impressions.

Thumb Stop/Hook Rate Ratio: Number of 3-second video plays/ impressions

This shows how often users spend at least three seconds on your video when scrolling through their feed.

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Why is the hook ratio important?

The hook ratio is a great way to rate the first impression and engagement of your video ads. Let's say one of your videos has a thumb stop ratio of 30% while another has just 15%. Scrolling was stopped significantly more frequently for the first ad than for the second. This means that the hook or the first 3 seconds of your video were more appealing to a larger portion of the audience reached.

However, it is important to say that a good hook rate value does not necessarily mean that it is a successful ad. Despite a good hook, other relevant metrics such as CTR or CPA can be poor.

It's extremely important to get your audience's attention in the first three seconds to get them to keep watching and ultimately get your main message across.

Knowing your hook ratio helps you understand how appealing your ad is and whether it's successfully attracting the interest of your target audience.

High hook ratios show you that your video ad is successfully capturing the attention of your target audience and getting them to stop scrolling and watching the creative.

Where can I find the hook rate?

In creative analysis tools such as DatAds Can you read the hook ratio or thumb stop ratio directly in your Top Performer report. In Meta's Ads Manager, however, you also have the option to display this metric directly in your Ads Manager via the Custom Metric function. TikTok does not yet allow you to create your own metrics.

2. Hold rate

The hold rate measures how well and for how long users interact with our ad. Does our video creative not only manage to attract attention, but also manage to persuade users to continue watching the video? We recommend using Thru Plays for this. Thru plays are triggered when a user has watched your video completely or for at least 15 seconds. In today's era of short attention spans, that's pretty “long.”

Hold Rate: Thru Plays/3-Second Video Plays

The hold rate therefore shows you how many% of users watched the entire video from 3 seconds to 15 seconds.

Like the hook rate, you won't find the hold rate as a standard metric in Meta or TikTok Ads Manager. In DatAds It is integrated by default, but you can also create it as a custom metric in Ads Manager at Meta.

A high ad hold rate can show you that users are interested in the ad content and are at least engaged with it.

This can be a good sign that your creative is well received by the target group and is also making a lasting contribution to greater brand awareness.

On the other hand, a low ad hold rate could indicate that the ad is unable to hold users' attention. Say your hook is convincing but the following content is not relevant. Either users have already received enough information to click on the call to action or the content following the hook is not interesting enough for the target group.

With a targeted replacement of the middle part of the video ad, a creative test can therefore be carried out.

However, it is important to say that the ad hold rate is just one of many that can be used to evaluate creatives. It's important to consider other metrics, such as click-through rate and CPAs/ROAS, to get a more complete picture of how your creatives are performing.

It can therefore be said that a metric alone usually does not show you the full truth.

3. CPA & ROAS

Probably the most important reason why marketers advertise on Meta & TikTok is to generate more sales - and profitably at best. This is exactly why the metrics CPA (Cost per Action) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) play a decisive role.

However, a lot has changed since the iOS14 update. At first, you could mostly observe fewer conversions in the ad account, then there were too many again. In the end, it can be said that you cannot 100% trust the figures from Ads Manager.

This knowledge is fundamentally important in order to be able to optimize your campaigns and creatives in a targeted manner. Overattribution and underattribution are also often spoken of in this context. No matter how much you trust the Meta/TikTok figures, it is important to understand which creatives are attributed to conversions and why.

The following scenario:

Ad 1: Spend 30€. Conversions 10th CPA: €3. CTR: 0.2% Hook rate: 9%

Ad 2: Spend 400€ conversions 40. CPA: 10€. CTR: 2.1% Hook rate: 44.4%

Ad 1 (slightly exaggerated) is a phenomenon that can be observed particularly in Q4. An ad was temporarily paused because the metrics didn't look good. 5 days later, it suddenly looks excellent as conversions were apparently attributed to it. Should you reactivate the ad now? Rather no. Yes, there is post-attribution, but you should always look at it in the overall context of the entire ad account. If the figures are realistic, you can reactivate ads. But if they simply don't make sense to you, the ad should stay off for now.

Ad 2 is a classic example. Based on the conversion data, it looks worse than Ad 1, but according to CTR and hook rate, it works very well for the target group. Even if the figures are presented too optimistically here, Ad 2 shows us that Meta/TikTok favors this ad, is well received by the target group and also generates conversions.

Even if we don't trust the 40 conversions and it's probably less. Can you see from these figures that the ad seems to be working very well with the target group, places Meta/TikTok Spend on it and that we should therefore give the ad additional budget.

The core message of this is that you should not 100% trust conversion metrics, but you should definitely use them for analysis in order to understand which creatives the algorithm allocates a lot of spend. This is particularly important for ad groups with many creatives, such as Advantage + Shopping Campaigns.

4. CTR (click-through rate)

The link click-through rate is another important metric that should play a role when analyzing your ads. It measures how well your ad was clicked. Speak:

CTR: Link Clicks/Impressions

It is important here that you display the correct CTR (link click-through rate). With CTR (All), for example, all clicks (including those to your profile and further engagement) are counted as clicks.

The CTR gives you insights into whether your call to action is working and whether your ad arouses people's interest in finding out more about the offer. A low click rate often indicates that you're either not reaching the right audience, your creative is too weak, or people simply aren't interested in what you offer.

5. Useful on-platform metrics

Impressions, clicks, and average playback time are metrics that you can also use to evaluate your creatives. Based on the impressions you've already generated, you can make better decisions as to whether enough people have already seen your creative before you scale or pause creatives. The same applies to clicks.

You can use the average playback time of your videos as information on how long your videos can or should last.

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Concluding is a promise that no metrics should be considered alone. In order to really understand your creatives better, you should look at all the metrics mentioned above together and evaluate whether you are on the right track with the performance shown.

The interplay of the individual metrics then tells you the whole story.

It is also always recommended to implement soft conversions. These are conversions that take place before the final goal. In eCommerce, a classic example would be an “Add to Cart” or “Initiate Checkout” event. These events give you even better insights into your ads.