Glossary
Reply rate
Reply rate is the share of submitted proposals that received a message from the client, which Upsight counts from Upwork's proposal record per member, per campaign and per keyword, over proposals old enough to have been answered.
Updated
Also written: Response rate.
On Upwork a reply is the client opening a message room on your proposal; Upwork's proposal insights call this "messaged" and show it, for a Freelancer Plus account, as a count per job. Some bidding tools price on it: Lancer charges per "conversation started", which is the same event. It is the first number on Upwork that means a human read the letter and wanted more.
Measured honestly it needs two populations. The numerator is proposals that got a reply; the denominator must be proposals that had the chance to, which excludes those sent in the last day or two and those withdrawn or declined before anyone read them. A reply rate over everything sent this month understates the campaign; one over everything that got a view overstates it. Upsight reports the rate over proposals that have been walked for an outcome, with that count printed beside it, and the same population feeds proposal view rate and hire rate.
What moves it, in our ledger: the position a boosted proposal held, the competition on the job at twelve hours, the match between the agency's case studies and the post, and the member who bids. What does not, measured over a season of our own sends, is the suitability score band a job fell into, which is why Upsight keeps the score as a filter and not as a promise.
How Upsight uses it. Reply rate is the headline of the per-member funnel and of the campaign analytics, the reply itself lands in the inbox, and the daily digest reports replies against the proposals that could have earned them.
Source
Upsight's term; the Upwork page it refers to: Proposal insights, read on .
Where Upsight measures it: the ledger.