Your best-performing channel by bookings might be your worst by profit. If you're not measuring margin after costs, you're optimizing the wrong number.
Hotels obsess over booking volume per channel and ignore what each booking actually keeps. A booking is not a dollar of profit, and channels differ wildly once you subtract their costs.
The number that matters: contribution margin per channel.
Run it for each source:
OTA booking: ADR minus 15 to 18% commission. High volume, thin margin.
Paid direct (ads): ADR minus your cost-per-booking from ad spend. Margin depends entirely on your CPA.
Organic and email direct: ADR minus near-zero acquisition cost. Your most profitable bookings, almost always.
Two channels can deliver the same revenue and leave you with very different profit. Rank channels by contribution margin instead of booking count and the picture often flips, and so should your budget.
Build a simple version this week: take last month's bookings by channel, subtract each channel's real cost (commission or ad spend), and rank by what's left. The channel you should be feeding is usually not the one with the most bookings.