Proposal view rate

Upwork records whether and when a client opened a proposal. The record is visible to the freelancer on the proposal itself, and Upwork's proposal insights show, for a Freelancer Plus account, how many of a job's organic proposals were opened, shortlisted and messaged. Upwork's own guidance on unviewed proposals says the client first sees the opening lines of the cover letter with the name, picture, badges, rate and JSS, and that on a high-volume job a client may shortlist before reaching yours. A proposal can be edited for six hours or until the client views it.

Two things decide the rate more than the letter does. Position: a boosted proposal in one of the four promoted slots is opened far more often, and our own ledger shows refunded boosts still earning about two and a half times the views of unboosted proposals, most of them before the refund. Competition: a job that already shows dozens of proposals at twelve hours is a job where many letters are never opened.

The denominator is the trap. A rate computed over proposals sent this week is lower than one computed over proposals old enough to have been read, and mixing a complete numerator with a partial denominator produced a 2,050% conversion rate in one early report of ours.

How Upsight uses it. Upsight reads the viewed timestamp from Upwork's proposal record, counts views over the proposals that have been walked for an outcome, and reports the rate per member, per campaign and per keyword next to reply rate and hire rate, with the count of proposals it was computed over.