Some of these clients you bought. Some the marketplace introduced.

A consumer marketplace sends bookings to businesses listed on it because somebody searched the marketplace, not because your campaign worked.

That revenue is genuine and worth having. Treated as evidence that advertising is working, it inflates whichever channel happened to be running.

Separating marketplace arrivals is usually the largest single correction in the file, and it is available directly wherever the export carries a booking origin.

The follow-on question is the more interesting one: whether marketplace clients return at the same rate as the ones you acquired yourself.

They frequently do not, and knowing the difference changes what a business is willing to pay for its own acquisition.

Where a marketplace charges a fee on new-client bookings, that fee is an acquisition cost exactly like a click or a printed card.

Because it is deducted rather than invoiced, it sits outside the marketing budget and never gets compared with the channels that are in it.

Putting it beside revenue per acquired client makes the comparison real: a commission on a client who returns ten times is cheap, and on one who never returns it is not.

That calculation is the whole marketplace decision, and almost nobody runs it because the two numbers live in different places.

The report puts them in one place and leaves the conclusion to you.

Nearly every channel in this category leads with a discount, so the first transaction measures the offer rather than the client.

The channels look alike at that point, which is why cost per new client is such a stable and such an unhelpful ranking.

Six months of sales summed by client shows who kept coming at full price, and the ordering routinely differs from the acquisition-cost ordering.

It also shows which offers produce returning clients, which is usually a cheaper thing to change than the channel itself, and it can be tested next month rather than next year.

Product sales and membership plans carry better margin than chair or room time, and a minority of clients account for most of them.

That propensity travels with the kind of client a channel brings rather than with the service they booked.

A file containing service revenue alone therefore understates the channels producing engaged clients and flatters the ones producing discount-seekers.

Including retail and memberships is one column of difference and it reorders the ranking often enough to be worth doing every time.

The membership case is the sharper one. A client on a monthly plan is predictable revenue with a known life, and a channel that converts clients onto plans is worth substantially more than one producing the same number of one-off bookings at the same price.