Every report opens with a sensible default set of columns — spend, your primary success metric, and the usual suspects around them. Useful, but it's a starting point, not the answer to your question. Here's how to get the numbers you actually care about in front of you.
The two places metrics live
There are two, and the difference trips people up:
The chart. Click + Add metric on the chip row above the chart and search for what you want. Every metric you add becomes a coloured chip with an × to take it off again, and this is what changes what's plotted — all three chart views (bar, line and card/grid) read from here.
2. The table. Open Custom columns → Customize table columns at the top of the table.
This is the full library, and it's where you'll find the long tail — the video retention metrics, the funnel-step conversion rates, everything Meta and TikTok report that isn't in the default set. It's also how you get more columns: the table isn't limited to what's plotted on the chart, and Custom columns is where the extra ones come from.
If a metric you're after isn't in the chart picker, look in the table columns panel. That's usually the whole mystery.
Column presets: the shortcut we'd use
Rather than assembling the same fifteen columns every time, pick a preset. We ship a set built for common jobs — Meta Ecommerce, Meta SaaS, Meta Video Engagement, TikTok Shop, TikTok Video Engagement — and they're a much better starting point than the default columns if you know what kind of account you're looking at.
The video engagement presets are the ones we push hardest. If you're reviewing creative and you're still looking at spend and ROAS alone, you're missing the diagnostic layer entirely.
"Where do I find hook rate and hold rate?"
This is far and away the most common version of this question, and the answer is that we have both — they're just not always called what you expect.
Hook lives as Thumbstop ratio and 1st frame retention. Thumbstop is the one to lead with.
Hold rate is called exactly that.
You'll also find Sustain rate (Meta), Video avg. play time, the 25 / 50 / 75 / 95 / 100% video play rates, Cost per 3-second video play and Cost per ThruPlay. All of them sit in Customize table columns, and the Video Engagement preset pulls the useful ones in one click.
A word on reading them: thumbstop tells you whether the first frame earned attention, hold rate tells you whether the ad deserved it. A high thumbstop with a low hold rate is a great opening shot attached to a weak ad — and that's a much more actionable finding than a bad ROAS on its own.
Building your own
If the metric you want doesn't exist because it's specific to your business — contribution margin ROAS, cost per qualified lead — you can build it as a formula rather than exporting to a spreadsheet. That's covered properly in Custom Metrics; once created, your custom metrics appear alongside the standard ones everywhere you build reports.
Metrics and Advanced Filters
Metrics aren't only columns — they're also conditions. Metric filter lets you cut the report by number: spend above a threshold, ROAS below one. It opens a modal headed Metric filter records, and a rule reads Where → Spend → > → the number you type, with a small box for the unit. The operators are symbols rather than words — >, ≥, <, ≤, =, ≠ — so there is nothing hiding under is at least.
Since Advanced Filters shipped, you can group those conditions. Single conditions go in with + Add filter rule; Add filter group — the button with the small panel icon — drops in an indented, orange-bordered box with its own Where row and its own + Add filter rule, joined to the rules above it by an And dropdown. So you can build something like (Spend > 500) And (Thumbstop ratio > 30% Or Hold rate > 15%) — high-spend ads that are strong on at least one of your video signals. Groups combine with And and nest one level deep. It's the fastest way we know to build a "these deserve a proper look" shortlist.
Worth knowing: a metric filter only makes sense against metrics your account actually reports. If you filter on something Meta or TikTok isn't returning for those ads, you'll get an empty report rather than an error — so if a filter empties your table, check the metric before you check the filter.
What your report table is actually telling you
Three controls sit above the table: the Custom columns dropdown, a Show ad status toggle and a Show tags dropdown. Underneath them the table is doing more work than it looks, and most of it goes unnoticed — so:
The header checkboxes are the chart. The first column is Ad name; after that comes a column per metric — Spend, Purchases, ROAS, CPA, Purchase value, AOV and whatever else you've added — and every metric header carries its own checkbox. Ticked means plotted. That's the entire relationship between the table and the chart above it, and it's the thing to understand before you read the next section.
Every metric column sorts. Up and down arrows in each header. It's the cheapest way to answer "what's my worst CPA?" without building a filter for it.
The colour shading is performance-relative, not decoration. Cells are shaded against the average, and hovering one gives you a tooltip along the lines of Diff from avg −2%. So the colour isn't telling you "good" or "bad" in the abstract — it's telling you how far from this report's own average that number sits. Scan for colour, hover to see the size of the gap. Almost nobody knows this is there and it's one of the quickest reads on the page.
A grouped row tells you how many ads are in it. Beneath the ad name you'll see a count — 3 ads, 5 ads — and hovering the row gives you a View details link to open what's inside. Always worth a glance before you draw a firm conclusion from a row that turns out to be one ad and a rounding error.
"Why is + Add metric greyed out?"
Because you've already got eight on the chart. Eight is the cap on how many metrics can be plotted at once — that's the chip row, and the ticked checkboxes in the table header — and once you're at eight, + Add metric greys out until you take one off. It behaves the same way in system reports and custom reports.
Now the part worth being precise about, because this is where the frustration comes from: eight is a chart limit, not a table limit. Your table can carry considerably more than eight metric columns. Untick a metric and it stops being drawn on the chart — it doesn't leave the table. And when you want another number in front of you, you add it as a column through Custom columns; you only need to free up one of the eight if you want it drawn.
It's a long-standing cap rather than something that changed recently, so if you remember having more than eight numbers on screen at once, you probably did — that'll have been the table.
In practice, hitting eight is usually a prompt worth taking: a chart with eight lines on it is rarely telling you anything the best three weren't. Leave the long tail in the table, where you can sort it, and plot the two or three you're actually arguing about.
Getting the numbers out
Once your columns are right, you can export the table to CSV, share the report by link, or take a Snapshot. CSV is the export format — there's no PDF export from a report. If a column preset is selected, snapshots record the columns themselves rather than the preset name — so a snapshot stays readable even if you later change the preset.
A snapshot also states its own scope beneath the chart, along the lines of 8 results (Color formatting based on 420 results): the rows you shared, and the full set the colour formatting was judged against.
That is worth knowing before someone asks why the version you sent has fewer rows than the report you built it from. Whoever you send it to can put their questions straight into the Comments panel down the right-hand side of the snapshot rather than emailing you.
If you tell us what you're trying to work out, we'll tell you which metrics to put on screen — just shout, happy to go through it with you.