Every campaign report has a reach number on the first slide. It's the easiest metric to get, and one of the least useful for deciding what to do next. Reach tells you a thing was shown. It doesn't tell you if it worked, or what to make more of.
Here's what we actually look at, in the order we look at it.
Hook rate
The percentage of viewers still watching at the 2–3 second mark. This is the single best pre-launch signal for comparing creative options, because it isolates the one job every piece of content has to do before anything else matters: earn the next second of attention. Low hook rate means the problem is the first frame, not the offer, the creator, or the targeting.
Save and share ratio, organic
Likes are cheap. Saves and shares cost the viewer something — a small decision that this is worth coming back to or worth sending to someone. On organic posts, this ratio is the best available proxy for whether content is genuinely useful or just pleasant to scroll past. We weight it more heavily than comment count, which skews toward controversy as much as quality.
Cost per hold
Not cost per mille — cost per completed view past a meaningful watch threshold, usually 15 seconds for a 30-second piece. CPM tells you what it costs to appear. Cost per hold tells you what it costs to actually be watched. The gap between the two numbers is often where the real budget waste is hiding.
Creative fatigue curve
We track CPA and CTR for each asset across its flight, not just at launch. Almost everything decays — the question is how fast, and whether the decay is gradual or a cliff. A slow decay means a piece can keep running with minor refreshes. A cliff means the creative pipeline needs to be ahead of the calendar, not reacting to it.
Brand search lift
The hardest of the five to measure cleanly, and the most important for anything upper-funnel. Direct attribution undercounts discovery content almost by definition — someone who sees a video and searches the brand a week later rarely shows up as a last-click conversion. Pre/post search volume, or a geo holdout when the budget supports one, is the closest thing to an honest read on whether the content is actually building the brand or just performing for the platform.
What this replaces
None of these numbers are exotic. What's different is what they're not: reach, impressions, and follower growth, which tend to dominate reports because they're the easiest to report favorably. The five above answer a harder, more useful question — should we make more of this — which is the only question a campaign report should actually be trying to answer.