what's up marketers today's video is going to be all about one of my favorite metrics on Facebook ads manager which is the hold rate so what is a hold rate you cannot actually select hold rate inside a Facebook ads manager you have to create a custom metric for it and the custom metric that you're going to create is through play divided by impressions so what is a through play a through play occurs when a user has watched 15 seconds of your video ad so say a user is scrolling through Instagram and your video ad pops
up on their feed if they've watched 15 seconds of it then that is going to count as a through play big question you're probably asking yourself right now is what if my ad is less than 15 seconds long then in that case if someone watches your ad to completion whether or not it is three seconds long or five seconds long or 10 seconds long then that also counts as a through play knowing this detail is actually incredibly important to know but more on that later it actually recently got me in trouble with a client and
I'm gonna tell you the story about that at the end of this video so why are hold rates so important when analyzing your video creative well from my perspective hold rates tell a much larger part of the story we all know and love the metric hook rate which shows us the percentage of people who watched the first three seconds of the video but to be honest knowing how to create a good hook is frankly the easy part when it comes to creative strategy it's like experimenting with clickbait essentially but knowing how to increase your hold
rate is way harder and frankly probably more important and the reason why is because the holdery is actually showing you a more engaged user oftentimes when you're just looking at the hook rate you're looking at window Shoppers or you're looking at people who were really interested in the first three seconds but they could have just dropped off at second four you don't really know that but a through play AKA a hold rate metric is literally telling you the percentage of all people who watched up to 15 seconds for your ad so which one would you
rather have would you rather have a high hook rate or a high hold rate now these are definitely parametrics in my experience I've often found that top performing ads tend to have a high hook rate but they also tend to have a high hold rate and I have found that it is more difficult actually to train people up on how to get higher hold rates and I'm actually going to show you five of the strategies that we use at thesis to increase our hold rates but before I do that I have one favor to ask
which is to like And subscribe to this video because it's free and will definitely increase your hook and hold rates oh God I tried so here are some ways that you can increase your hold rates on your Facebook ads video creative and your Tick Tock ads video creative actually a lot of these strategies are things that I'm taking from watching a lot of tick tocks and reels and the first strategy is to make quicker cuts to make jump Cuts between different scenes I can't tell you how many times I've seen karito come across my metaphorical
desk right here and it was literally ugc content or video content that was in one single frame or shot really easy ways for you to increase your hold rates or to add more b-roll or to even jump cut in or out on the person that's in the frame or the subject matter this is part of the reason why at thesis we create modular content with our ugc creators which essentially means that we have them filming a testimonial and then anywhere from 20 to 30 clips of b-roll Because we are just literally putting tons of that
b-roll over top of their testimonial that is literally the stretch my quick hack here is I try to make each clip less than two seconds long sometimes less than one minute long strategy number two which I found to be really engaging is to create multiple angles of the same thing number two is that you should create multiple angles of the same thing kind of like this yeah liked what I did there I even find if you're just changing up the angle ever so slightly but you're including both in your content that tends to have people
stay on for longer because they're like wait what's going on here we've done this in a lot of Studio shoots actually where we will have kma and cam B that are just ever so slightly different so that we can pan between the two and that almost always increases our hold rate and number three is actually more of a messaging tactic and that's that you really want to agitate the problem and essentially when you're agitating the problem that you're speaking to in the video creative you're letting the people know that they are actually in the right
place and that they feel seen the reality is is that no matter what type of product you are selling you are actually solving a problem for your user and you want to make sure that you are talking more about that problem and elaborating more on that problem so what you're literally showing people is more of the before State and then the after will be revealed with the presentation of your product I think it's easiest to understand this concept when looking at ugc type of content so when I'm creating ugc briefs I'll literally have hook agitate
the problem two times introduce the product benefit testimonial reel and then close out look at you CDA that is literally how I create all of my ugc briefs the fourth tactic to increasing your holder rates is to actually refer back to whatever you had in the hook or essentially continue the story one of the highest hold rates that I've ever seen on a piece of content was actually because we had a super strong hook so tons of people were stopping because of that really engaging hook but then we were following up on it immediately in
the subsequent frames a lot of times I see ugc content or video content on these paid social ad platforms where the hook actually have nothing to do with the rest of the video and you know what sometimes that works sometimes you really can improve conversions on a particular ad just by swapping out the hook but a lot of times I'm finding that you have to build on what is in the hook to really get those higher hold rates number five is one of my favorite strategies which is after the hook simply follow up with another
hook I like to call this strategy a hook reel so we've done this with a few clients one of my clients the perfect Gene we tend to do this quite a bit but we will literally just create compilations that are hook after hook after hook building off of one another so you know it could be worth for you guys to try just creating an entire ad that is using the hooks from all of your other top video ads this is something that I think is super actionable for almost everyone watching this video now one of
the most common questions I get about hold rates is what is a good hold rate and what is a good hook rate it's really funny one of my friends Anze over at Twitter he recently said that he's looking for hold rates that are anywhere from like 35 to 45 plus and I'm gonna tell you you that I typically do not see that high of hold rates I typically see hold rates that are on the good end anywhere from eight to twelve percent and that's really positive for me now one of the highest hold rates that
I had seen recently and this is my client story that I had told you guys I was going to talk about recently I was doing an analysis on an ad creative for a potential client and I saw that I had super high hold rates it was like 30 percent and I was like wow this is really incredible and this video was about a minute long and essentially what I was doing with this creative was I was doing an analysis with that creative against the other AD creative that had been in the account and I was
interested to find that all of the other creative even though it didn't perform as well had the same hold rates so 20 30 hold rates and I was like what the heck is going on here so I ended up looking at another metric which was the average watch time and I realized oh the average watch time on the other ads were about three seconds where I as the other watch time for the winning creative was around 11 seconds so I dug into the other creatives that were in this account and I realized that a majority
of them were only three six nine seconds long so it was triggering a through play even though the creative really wasn't that comparable so this is something that I was able to point out to my client like hey like this particular winning creative has a really high hold rate and yes you were going to see other similar hold rates in your account but it's because your content is so much shorter honestly I'm not gonna lie when I noticed this and I was able to communicate about it I felt like a superstar performance creative person so
steal that one for your next client call and that's it if you guys have any more questions about hold rates be sure to leave them for me in the comments below and like And subscribe because it's free and and you're still here at the end of the video so I'd appreciate it see you guys next time bye
