Boost auction

Every job with boosting enabled runs one. Upwork's rules: there are four slots, "the top four bidders at any time will appear at the top of the client's proposal list"; the auction "is closed after seven days or upon first hire, whichever comes first", and a proposal cannot be boosted on that post afterwards. Bids are in Connects on top of the proposal's own cost, placed from a table that shows other bids, and winners pay their own bid rather than the next one down.

Charging follows the close. The bid is held when placed, released when the auction closes while the results are sorted, and then charged to the winners; a bidder knocked out of the top four before the client interacted pays nothing, and a bidder who stays in the top four pays even if the client never opened the proposal. A small share of posts run placebo auctions where nothing is charged.

So the badge a proposal shows while the auction runs is a position, and the cost is only known at the close. Reading the badge on day one and calling it a win, or reading a refund and calling the boost wasted, both miss what happened: in our own ledger refunded boosts were viewed about two and a half times as often as unboosted proposals, most of those views before the refund, and outbid boosts were the cheapest per view of any kind.

How Upsight uses it. Upsight records the bid position at the send, settles each boost from the Connects history around day six or seven, and reports held, outbid and refunded boosts with their views and replies, so the bid size a campaign uses is chosen from measured outcomes and not from the badge.