Bid Quality Score aims to help quality freelancers to win more projects per bid, by giving feedback to freelancers who may be making too many low quality bids.

Since releasing Bid Quality score, we have observed that it has increased freelancers’ chances of getting work when placing a bid.

Your Bid Quality Score will be based on a number of factors, including real time feedback provided by employers whose projects you have bid on, our own algorithms and other sources. It is designed to reward legitimate bidders by penalising spammers.

We frequently get feedback that some freelancers are placing spammy bids on projects. These bids are often duplicates of previous bids or don't properly address the requirements in the project description. This is bad for employers, who have to sift through irrelevant bids, and it is also bad for you, because your bid might be crowded out by the low quality bids.

Our Bid Quality Score feature has been optimised to reward freelancers who take their time to write accurate and high quality bids, rather than quickly spamming irrelevant or generic bids.

You may notice that your Bid Quality Score will change on a day-to-day basis. This is because it reflects the quality of your recent bids, which will change with your recent activity. We are far more interested in the quality of the bids you are placing today, rather than the bids you placed last year.

This also means that it is possible for you to improve your Bid Quality Score, even if you have a history of low quality bids. However, it is essential to maintain such quality to keep your score high.

We will be using the Bid Quality Score in our other Freelancer.com programs and algorithms, including how we rank bids. It may also be used as part of determining eligibility into our Preferred Freelancer Program.

We hope that you will find this feature useful and that it will result in you being awarded more projects.

The following behaviours will be analysed to help you improve the quality of your bids:

• How well your bids relate to the project description. Employers can tell very quickly whether or not a bidding freelancer has taken the time to read their project brief.
• That you write bid proposals. If you do not write a bid proposal, your Bid Quality Score will be negatively affected.
• A demonstrated understanding of project requirements.
• That you have described what would need to be done in your own words; breaking down the project into a series of tasks and/or milestone payments.
• That projects have not been spammed with irrelevant bid proposals that are identical or similar text from previous bids.
• Accurate bid amounts have been chosen, based on the information available in the project description, and communication with employers prior to being awarded. Your Bid Quality Score will be affected if project fees are raised after the project has already been awarded.
• That your bid proposals are free from spelling and grammar errors. Employers are more likely to award proposals that have been written well.
• Whether your profile has been fully completed — this includes a profile photo.
• That the relevant skills selected on your Freelancer.com account, accurately reflect your work.
• That you have a portfolio of your own work uploaded to your Freelancer.com profile page.
• Whether you have NOT encouraged offsiting, by asking the employer to discuss the project via Skype, Whatsapp, or any other third party communication platforms.
• That there has been no use of bots or automated bidding tools.
• Your accept rate and completion rate. This will only penalise you if you reject a large number of bids you are awarded or fail to complete a large number of projects that have milestones created on them.

Active bidders should aim to maintain a Bid Quality Score above 90. If you are not actively bidding, your Bid Quality Score will tend toward 100.

Score Description

90 - 100 Your Bid Quality Score is good

65 - 89 There is room for improvement in your Bid Quality Score

0 - 64 Your Bid Quality Score is low and will penalise you

If you have a low Bid Quality Score, you will be temporarily penalised in terms of how your bids rank on projects, how visible your profile is on Freelancer, and access to special programs such as our Preferred Freelancer Program. These penalties are proportionate to your Bid Quality Score, and are designed to target spammers only.

The good news is that these penalties are temporary, so if you improve your Bid Quality Score, the penalty will be automatically lifted.