Meta reports a great many numbers and most of them describe the same thing. This guide is for whoever runs paid social. It covers the metrics that predict what happens next rather than describing what already happened, and why creative fatigue is visible before it reaches your results.
Return on ad spend is a lagging indicator
By the time return on ad spend falls, the decline has been underway for a while. It is an outcome, and outcomes arrive last.
That is why it is a poor basis for a decision on its own. Acting when it drops means acting after the money has been spent. The useful metrics are the ones that move first, and on Meta those are almost all creative metrics rather than account metrics.
Frequency and what it actually means
Frequency is how many times the average person in your audience has seen the ad.
Rising frequency with stable performance is fine. Rising frequency with falling click through rate is the clearest fatigue signal available: the audience has seen it, has decided, and is now being shown it again anyway.
The mistake is treating this as a bidding problem. Raising the bid or widening the budget makes it worse, because you buy more impressions from the same exhausted pool. The only real fix is new creative.
There is no universal frequency threshold. It depends on audience size and how distinctive the creative is. Learn your own by watching where click through rate historically begins to fall.
Hook rate is the earliest signal
Hook rate is the proportion of people who watch past the first few seconds. It is the earliest usable number on any video ad.
It is measurable within hours of launch, long before conversions accumulate, and it separates two very different problems that a poor return on ad spend cannot. A low hook rate means the creative is not earning attention, so nothing downstream matters. A high hook rate with poor conversion means the creative works and the offer, landing page or audience does not.
Those need opposite responses, and return on ad spend alone cannot tell them apart.
Hold rate and the rest of the funnel
Hold rate follows hook rate and measures how many stay to the end. Together they describe whether the creative earns and keeps attention.
After that, click through rate describes whether it prompted action, and conversion rate describes whether the page delivered on what the ad promised. A break at any point explains the numbers below it, which is why reading them in order is more useful than reading whichever one moved most.
What to do about fatigue
New creative, not new budget. Fatigue is an audience that has already seen the message, and no bidding change addresses that.
The creative library is where the answer usually comes from. Ads that worked before tend to share an angle or a hook style, and producing more of that is more reliable than starting from nothing. Fatigue is also frequently a hook problem rather than a whole ad problem, so a new opening on a proven ad sometimes restores performance for a fraction of the effort.
Reading it against the rest of the board
Meta’s own reported revenue is higher than the reconciled figure, consistently and expectedly, because Meta counts conversions its attribution model claims while the store counts settled orders. Use Meta’s numbers to compare Meta ads against each other, because they are internally consistent. Use the reconciled figure when deciding how much of your total budget belongs here.