Your client didn't skip the proposal. They never opened it.

A freelancer on r/Upwork put it plainly this month: "I finally read the Insights on every proposal I have sent. Not one of them was ever opened." That is one person on one platform. We wanted to know how common it is for the pages agencies send their clients, so we looked at our own data.

The numbers

Last 30 days, to 23 September 2026, across every Stacktree page that was read at least once:

And the other side of it. Of 167 pages published by signed-in accounts between five weeks and one week ago, and still live, 65 (39%) had never had a single reading session.

An earlier cut of proposals and reports only, taken the day before, pointed the same way. Of those documents that were opened, 65% of sessions reached halfway and 40% the bottom, with a median of 31 seconds. Of the signed-in ones, 41% got no sessions at all, another 19% were opened only by the person who made them, and only 5% were opened and abandoned straight away. Proposals and reports tend to be long, which may be why fewer sessions reach the end, but the pattern holds: the gap between "sent" and "opened" is far bigger than the gap between "opened" and "read".

How we measured it

Every Stacktree page carries a small first-party script that counts active reading time, only while the tab is visible and in focus, and how far down the page the reader got. We then applied three rules:

• Sessions under three seconds are excluded. A tab opened and closed by accident is not a read.
• Owner previews in the dashboard are not counted. But an owner opening their own public link in a normal browser can be, which is why the earlier cut separates pages opened only by their owner.
• Email previews and most link scanners do not count. They do not run the script, so they do not inflate the numbers.

The limits, in plain words. These are sessions, not people: one client reading twice is two sessions. A reader whose browser blocks scripts is invisible to us, so the true reading numbers are, if anything, a little higher. And a page with no sessions is not proof that a client ignored it. Some pages are tests, drafts or never sent. We cannot see the email, so we cannot tell a page nobody was sent from a page nobody opened. What we can say is that a large share of pages made to be read were not.

What it means

The advice most of us have absorbed is about the document: make it shorter, lead with the summary, cut the appendix. It is good advice. Propoze, a proposal software company, reports that proposals over 15 pages take 72 hours longer on average to get a response, and Digivate's piece "Nobody reads your marketing report" argues for putting the summary first.

But our numbers say the page is not where most of the loss is. A reader who opens it mostly gets to the end. The loss happens in the inbox, before the click, and nothing about the length or layout of the page can fix a page that was never opened.

There is a second, quieter problem: most senders cannot tell which situation they are in. A PDF reports nothing. Email open tracking has become unreliable because mail apps block or pre-load the tracking pixel, as Propal's guide to proposal tracking sets out. So the silence after a proposal could mean "reading it carefully", "never saw it", or "said no in their head". Those need three different follow-ups.

What to do about it

1. Send it as a named link, so you know

Send the proposal or report as a page, not an attachment. Before you copy the link, type the client's name in Who is this for? on the page's screen. From the Solo plan, every open comes back against that name, so "did Megan open it?" has an answer, and the page shows opens, unique readers and when it was last opened. On Studio and Firm it also shows how long it was read and how far. The step-by-step version is in send a client report as a link, and what each number means is on page engagement.

2. Put the thing in the message itself

The page is behind a click, so the reason to click has to be in the email. Give the page a page video: a one-minute silent video in the page's own colours and type, with every line checked against the page. Then paste its poster picture into the email, the headline on the page's colours with a play button, with a link underneath that ends in #watch and opens straight into the video. The client sees what the proposal says and how long it takes before they decide whether to click. How to do it, step by step: how to send a proposal that opens on its video.

3. Add a human line from you

A sentence in your own words beats any attachment. A recorded Loom is still great: Loom's own Intercom case study reports a 19% lift in reply rate on cold emails with personalised video, and those are videos a person recorded. A recording shows effort. The page video is the version the client finishes, and it stays on the page after the email is buried. They do different jobs, so send both when the deal is worth it.

4. Follow up on what they looked at

"Any updates?" asks the client to do work. If the page shows they opened it twice and spent most of the time on pricing, ask about pricing. If the video was watched to the end but the page barely scrolled, they have the gist, so offer a short call. If it was never opened, say so without blame and resend with one line on what is inside. Each of those is a better message than a nudge, and you can only write it if you sent something that tells you what happened.