You can't improve what you can't measure.
This is why we went the extra mile to provide the most accurate analytics existing in the Upwork world.
After your Scanners have been running for a while, it's time to check back and analyze what's been working and what's not.
This guide will only make sense if you followed our recommended scanner set up strategy where you broke down your scanners into meaningful segments.
Head to your scanner sending statistics on the Dashboard
Select the By Scanner view for your proposal breakdown.
What you will see is the performance breakdown of each of the scanners in the history of the selected period.
1. Analyzing the Reply Rate
One of the direct indicators of your Auto Bidder performance is the LRR (Lead Reply Rate).
The historical average LRR for agencies on Upwork has been around 7-8%, according to our largest in the world (second to Upwork itself) Upwork proposal database (over 200k records).
Well-optimized, Top Rated+ profiles were seen to perform by 1-2% more effectively than others.
If you are able to stay within this range, it means that your reply performance is decent.
If you're falling below these numbers, it's time to consider what you can improve in your strategy to get to the baseline performance. Some potential improvements could be found in:
Using better segmentation of Scanners
Optimizing your cover letter templates to be more personalized and provide better Proof of Previous Work
Optimizing your profile
Optimizing your pricing strategy
Niching down or niching out to less competitive landscapes
2. Analyzing the CPR (Cost Per Reply)
Historically, this metric was highly correlated with LRR. However, recently Upwork has changed its pricing strategy for bids, and now it is possible to participate in an auction for displaying your bid at the top of the list. This means that the Cost Per Proposal would vary a lot for active users of the auction.
If you've set your Auto Bidder to Boost Proposals using GigRadar Score [?], you will find the CPR metric to be highly informative of the effectiveness of your additional expense.
This metric varies a lot from industry to industry and deal size, so we cannot advise on the baseline. We've seen boosted proposals perform better than regular ones, yet it is important to correctly configure the Boosting Factor to optimize the Cost Per Reply.
In other words, as you spend more on boosting proposals, your total expenditure grows. At the same time you get more replies, and your Cost Per Reply shortens.
3. Analyzing the Score of your replies
So you went really far with your proposals sending, and your efficiency and the total number of replies grows. But how good are those replies?
We have developed a scoring system, GigRadar Score™ which will gradually participate in many of the app modules.
Roughly speaking, it evaluates all suitable opportunities that GigRadar finds for your team and assigns a specific % score for each opportunity. In this case, GigRadar Score™ can be used to determine how “juicy” are the leads that the scanner wins for you.
GigRadar Score™ is roughly normally distributed around the 50% mark for all opportunities on Upwork. It means that if your scanner's score is above 50%, you are getting "better than average leads". If it's below 50%, it means you are mostly winning lower-quality leads.
