Your bidding strategy directly influences your campaign performance, open rate, and overall ROI on platforms like Upwork. Effective bidding helps you:
Maximize visibility for your proposals by targeting the right jobs and clients.
Optimize costs by adjusting connects spent per proposal and avoiding overbidding.
Increase open and reply rates by being selective and timely with your applications.
If you have a low open rate or few replies, often the bidding strategy—not just the cover letter or profile—needs improvement.
Key Components of Bidding Strategy in Lancer
Bidding Delay
Set how long you have to review or cancel a proposal after Lancer writes it, before the bid goes out. The delay starts once the proposal is written, not when the job was posted.
No Delay sends the bid as soon as the proposal is written, with no time to review or cancel it. Until I approve holds the bid until you approve it.
Strategies:
Immediate bidding: Race to be among the first and catch active clients.
Scheduled delay: Wait and submit closer to times when clients are likely online. Useful for time zone targeting.
Bidding Criteria Warnings
Decide whether to skip jobs or bid anyway if you don't fully meet a client’s criteria.
Recommended: Skip if you’re not boosting, as low relevance can harm ranking.
Already Hired Action
Automatically skip jobs where the client has already hired someone to save connects.
This also applies when a failed bid is retried: before a retry, Lancer re-checks the job and skips it if the client has hired (unless you chose to bid anyway), is interviewing, or the job has closed.
Hourly Rate Strategy
Choose to match the job’s advertised rate, use your own rate, or set custom rules.
Adjust for market conditions or to remain competitive in your niche.
If Upwork hides your profile rate and leaves the rate box empty, Lancer types a stand-in rate so the bid can go through. It uses, in order: the profile rate shown on the page, the profile rate Lancer saved from your last sent bid on that account, the top of the job's hourly range, then your campaign minimum. The result is raised to your campaign minimum rate, if set. If there is nothing to go on, the bid can still fail. Set a minimum hourly rate on the campaign as a safety net.
Upwork only accepts hourly rates from $3 to $999. Lancer keeps every hourly bid inside that range: a rate above $999 (usually a fixed price typed into an hourly field) is sent as $999 instead of failing. Campaign rate fields only accept $3–$999.
Boost Proposals
Use boosting to increase your proposal’s ranking for highly competitive jobs.
Set parameters:
Down to 4th place or beyond if you want guaranteed higher visibility.
Connects above previous bidder: Outbid the current top proposal by a chosen margin.
Max/Min connects: Control spend for each boost.
While boosting is on, Min Connects must be at least 1 connect ($0.15); 0 isn't accepted. New campaigns start the minimum at 10 connects ($1.50), and you can lower it. The campaign form shows a message under the field and holds the boost settings back from saving until the value is valid.
Max Connects must be at least Min Connects, otherwise boosts could go above your cap.
A campaign saved earlier with a minimum below 1 connect (for example 0) keeps working and still saves other edits. The 1-connect minimum applies when you change the minimum or turn boosting on; turning boosting on over a minimum below 1 resets it to 10 connects.
Fallback action if budget runs out (e.g., skip job).
Essential Strategies for Effective Bidding
Boost selectively: Invest more connects on jobs with high budgets, top clients, or jobs in your strongest skills.
Avoid boosting low-quality jobs: Save your connects for the best-fit opportunities.
Track and adjust: If you notice a consistently low open rate, increase boosts or re-evaluate job filters for better matchmaking.
Manual review for key jobs: For especially important jobs, manually adjust configuration (e.g., boost, add personalization, or schedule send).
Leverage time zones: Schedule proposals to land at peak client activity periods to maximize open rates.
When Open Rates Are Low
If your campaign has a low open rate, examine your bidding strategy:
Are you sending proposals when clients are awake/active?
Are you boosting enough to reach the top slots?
Is your hourly rate too high/low for the market?
Are you avoiding jobs with many interviews already scheduled?