XHS Analytics Custom Reports: How to Tailor Dashboards for Every Team
Date Published
Table Of Contents
1. Why Custom Dashboards Matter for XHS Marketing Teams
2. Understanding XHS Native Analytics: Your Starting Point
3. The Four Team Views: Customizing Dashboards by Role
• Paid Media and Aurora Advertising Team Dashboard
• KOL and Influencer Marketing Team Dashboard
• Brand Strategy and Leadership Dashboard
1. Key XHS Metrics to Anchor Every Custom Report
2. Third-Party Tools to Extend Your XHS Analytics
3. Best Practices for Maintaining Your Custom Dashboards
4. Conclusion
Xiaohongshu (RedNote) gives brands a remarkably transparent window into performance — but opening that window reveals a dashboard built primarily for individual creators, not cross-functional marketing teams with different goals and different questions. Your content strategist needs to know which note formats are driving saves. Your paid media manager needs ROAS and CTR data from Aurora campaigns. Your KOL team needs engagement benchmarks by influencer tier. And your CMO needs a single-screen view that connects all of it to revenue.
One undifferentiated dashboard serves none of them well.
This guide is built around a simple but powerful idea: the most effective XHS analytics setups are the ones tailored to the people reading them. We'll walk through XHS native analytics as the foundation, then break down exactly how to customize reporting views for four distinct team functions — so every stakeholder gets the data that drives better decisions, not more noise.
Why Custom Dashboards Matter for XHS Marketing Teams {#why-custom-dashboards}
Most international brands entering Xiaohongshu make the same early mistake: they track everything and act on nothing. The native XHS analytics dashboard surfaces a broad range of data points — impressions, engagement rate, save rate, follower growth, traffic sources, audience demographics — and it can feel overwhelming when your team isn't sure which numbers belong to whom. The result is often a monthly report that everyone receives, nobody owns, and few actually use to change strategy.
Custom reporting solves this by creating focused, role-specific views that surface only the metrics relevant to each team's decisions. A content creator shouldn't have to scroll past ROAS figures to find their save rate trends. A CFO shouldn't have to dig through note-level engagement data to assess campaign ROI. When the right data reaches the right person in the right format, reporting stops being an obligation and starts becoming an actual strategic input.
For international brands operating on XHS, the customization challenge has an extra layer: the platform's native analytics interface is primarily in Chinese (中文), which adds friction for global teams. Building custom report views — whether within the native dashboard, via exported data in tools like Google Sheets, or through third-party analytics platforms — also creates an opportunity to translate and reframe metrics into language your whole team understands, regardless of where they're based.
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Understanding XHS Native Analytics: Your Starting Point {#xhs-native-analytics}
Before you customize anything, it's worth understanding what XHS actually gives you out of the box. Access to analytics on Xiaohongshu requires a Professional Account (专业号). Once you have one, your analytics hub is the Creator Center (创作者中心), accessible through the "Me" tab in the mobile app, or via the desktop version at pro.xiaohongshu.com — which is far easier to work with when preparing reports for stakeholders.
The native dashboard organizes data into several core sections:
• Overview Panel (概览): High-level account health — follower growth, total impressions, engagement trends — with selectable time periods of 7, 30, or 90 days.
• Content Analysis (笔记分析): Individual post performance, sortable by impressions, engagement rate, or publication date.
• Audience Insights (粉丝分析): Demographic breakdown including age, gender, geographic distribution, and active times.
• Traffic Sources (流量来源): The split between discovery feed traffic, search traffic, and follower-driven views.
• E-commerce Data (电商数据): Available for accounts with XHS Shop integration — product click-through rates, conversion events, and revenue attribution.
The native analytics are genuinely more granular than many Western platforms offer, but they do have a ceiling. Cross-platform integration, automated reporting, and advanced attribution are not natively available. That's where custom reporting layers — either through data exports or third-party tools — become essential for growing brands.
Tip for international teams: AllXHS's free resources library includes translated XHS dashboard walkthroughs and ready-to-use reporting templates built specifically for global teams navigating this challenge.
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The Four Team Views: Customizing Dashboards by Role {#four-team-views}
Here is where the strategic work begins. The following four dashboard frameworks aren't arbitrary — they're organized around the actual decisions each team needs to make week-to-week and month-to-month on XHS.
Content Team Dashboard {#content-team}
The content team's job on XHS is to create notes (笔记) that earn distribution, engagement, and saves. Their custom dashboard should be laser-focused on content signals — the metrics that tell them what the algorithm is rewarding and what their audience actually values.
Priority metrics for a content team view:
• Save Rate (收藏率): The single most important content quality signal on XHS. A save rate above 5% for tutorial or educational content indicates strong purchase consideration and high content value. Aim to benchmark this per content format.
• Engagement Rate: Calculated as (likes + comments + collects + shares) / impressions × 100. Healthy rates for established accounts sit between 3–5%, though high-performing niche content can exceed 8%.
• Traffic Source Breakdown: The ratio of discovery feed traffic vs. search traffic vs. follower traffic reveals whether content is relying on the algorithm, earned SEO, or existing audience. A search traffic percentage above 40% signals strong evergreen content value.
• Top-Performing Notes by Format: Sort content by save rate and engagement rate separately — a note can have high likes but low saves, which tells a different story than one with high saves but few comments.
• Comment Quality Signals: Track substantive comments (those with 10+ characters or clear product questions) as a proxy for purchase intent, not just comment volume.
The content team's view should be refreshed weekly and displayed as a simple sortable table with conditional formatting to highlight over- and under-performers. Posting time data — particularly peak activity hours for their specific follower base — should also live in this view to support scheduling decisions.
Paid Media and Aurora Advertising Team Dashboard {#paid-media-team}
XHS's native advertising platform, Aurora (聚光, also known as Juguang), is where brands run feed ads, search ads, and splash screen campaigns. Aurora provides its own analytics layer within the platform's ad backend, and it's here that the paid media team needs a tightly scoped custom view built around efficiency and return.
Aurora supports multiple campaign objectives — brand awareness, consideration, traffic generation, and conversions — and each objective maps to a different set of primary KPIs. A well-designed paid media dashboard separates these objectives clearly rather than blending them into one aggregated view.
Priority metrics for a paid media dashboard:
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): A healthy CTR on XHS sits between 3–8%. Below 2% signals a creative problem and should trigger a content review.
• CPM and CPC: Track cost efficiency trends over time and across ad formats. Search ads and feed ads will have very different benchmarks.
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): The north star metric for performance campaigns. For e-commerce brands, connect this to product-level revenue attribution where possible.
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): Whether the conversion goal is a lead form, app install, or product purchase, CPA needs to be benchmarked against product margins.
• Audience Segment Performance: Break down results by the targeting segments used — age, interest tag, behavioral signal, lookalike audience — to identify where budget is working hardest.
• A/B Test Results: Track creative variants side-by-side to build an institutional knowledge base of what performs on XHS.
For brands working with agencies or running campaigns through a certified Aurora partner, this dashboard view also serves as the weekly alignment tool between in-house stakeholders and external partners. Standardize the format early so reporting doesn't become a translation exercise every week.
KOL and Influencer Marketing Team Dashboard {#kol-team}
KOL (Key Opinion Leader) and KOC (Key Opinion Consumer) campaigns are central to how brands build credibility and reach on XHS. Unlike paid ads, KOL performance is more nuanced — raw reach matters, but resonance and downstream intent signals matter more. The influencer team's custom dashboard needs to reflect that.
XHS's Dandelion (蒲公英) platform is the official channel for brand-KOL collaboration, and it provides campaign-level data that can be pulled into your custom reporting framework. Third-party tools like XinHong Data (新红数据) add a further layer of competitive benchmarking and historical performance data by creator.
Priority metrics for a KOL dashboard:
• Engagement Rate by KOL Tier: Benchmark mega, macro, micro, and nano influencers separately. Micro-KOLs on XHS frequently outperform larger accounts on engagement rate due to tighter community trust.
• Save Rate per Collaboration: Saves are the strongest signal of purchase intent from KOL content. Track this per creator and per content format.
• Content-Attributed Traffic: If using UTM parameters or XHS Shop links, track how much qualified traffic each KOL collaboration drives to product pages or stores.
• Comment Sentiment and Quality: Analyze the nature of audience responses — product questions, repurchase intent mentions, and sentiment polarity provide qualitative data that raw engagement numbers miss.
• Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and Influencer Campaign Index: Compare investment against content output and downstream performance to identify your most efficient KOL partners for future briefs.
• Brand Mention Volume: Track organic mentions of your brand in user-generated content that correlates with campaign timing — a leading indicator of earned awareness.
This dashboard should be reviewed both during active campaigns (weekly) and during quarterly retrospectives to inform KOL roster decisions and content brief development.
Brand Strategy and Leadership Dashboard {#leadership-dashboard}
Senior stakeholders — CMOs, brand directors, regional heads — need a fundamentally different view of XHS performance. Their dashboard should not be a compressed version of the operational dashboards above. It should answer one question clearly: Is our XHS investment working, and where should we go next?
This means aggregated, period-over-period comparisons with clear benchmarking context, not raw data tables.
Priority metrics for a leadership dashboard:
• Monthly Active Reach and Follower Growth Rate: A healthy growth rate for established brands sits at 3–8% monthly. Track trajectory, not just absolute numbers.
• Blended Engagement Rate (Organic + Paid): A composite view of how the brand's overall XHS presence is resonating with its audience.
• Total ROAS Across Campaigns: Aggregated return on all paid activity — Aurora ads, KOL campaigns, and boosted notes — compared to the previous period and against a target.
• Content Pipeline Health: Are enough high-performing notes in distribution? What's the ratio of notes hitting above-benchmark save rates?
• Search Visibility Trend: Is the brand growing its organic search footprint on XHS? This is a long-term equity metric that deserves a permanent place in leadership reporting.
• Competitive Context: Where available, incorporate category benchmarks and share-of-voice signals through third-party tools.
This dashboard is best delivered as a one-page visual summary — either in the XHS desktop analytics view with custom date comparisons, or built in Google Looker Studio or a similar BI tool using exported XHS data. The goal is a five-minute read that arms leadership with everything they need for strategic decision-making.
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Key XHS Metrics to Anchor Every Custom Report {#key-metrics}
Regardless of which team view you're building, certain metrics are foundational enough to appear in every XHS reporting setup. Think of these as the shared vocabulary that connects your custom dashboards to a common source of truth.
| Metric | Chinese Term | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 曝光量 | Volume of content visibility — baseline for all rate calculations |
| Save Rate | 收藏率 | Strongest signal of content value and purchase intent |
| Engagement Rate | 互动率 | Algorithm health proxy — (likes + comments + saves + shares) / impressions |
| Search Traffic % | 搜索流量占比 | Indicates SEO effectiveness and evergreen content value |
| CTR | 点击率 | Ad creative effectiveness — benchmark 3–8% on XHS |
| Follower Growth Rate | 涨粉率 | Audience momentum — healthy range is 3–8% monthly |
| ROAS | 广告投资回报率 | Paid media efficiency — connects spend to revenue |
For international teams working with a Chinese-language interface, having this bilingual metric reference built directly into your report templates eliminates a consistent source of friction and reduces misinterpretation across language barriers.
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Third-Party Tools to Extend Your XHS Analytics {#third-party-tools}
XHS's native analytics are a solid foundation, but brands serious about performance measurement will eventually need to extend beyond them. A few key tools are worth knowing:
• XinHong Data (新红数据): The leading third-party analytics platform built specifically for XHS. Offers real-time trending keyword data, competitive benchmarking, historical performance data for any public XHS account, and in-depth creator analysis. Essential for KOL selection and content strategy research.
• Google Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio): For brands that export XHS data to Google Sheets or BigQuery, Looker Studio provides free, flexible visualization capabilities and easy sharing with international teams. Useful for building leadership dashboards and cross-channel views that blend XHS data with website or e-commerce metrics.
• XHS Creator Center Desktop (pro.xiaohongshu.com): The desktop version of the native analytics platform. Easier to compare posts side-by-side and export data for external analysis than the mobile app.
• CRM and Attribution Integration: For e-commerce brands, connecting XHS ad click data (via UTM parameters and XHS pixel setup) to CRM or analytics platforms enables true multi-touch attribution — connecting the XHS touchpoint to the final purchase.
For brands that want expert guidance on setting up these tools in an integrated way, AllXHS offers industry-specific Xiaohongshu marketing strategies and expert consultation services designed to accelerate this process across 20+ verticals.
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Best Practices for Maintaining Your Custom Dashboards {#best-practices}
Building a custom dashboard is only the beginning. The teams that get the most value from XHS analytics are the ones that treat their dashboards as living documents — reviewed, refined, and updated as the platform evolves and business priorities shift.
Establish a review cadence. Operational dashboards (content and paid media) should be reviewed weekly. KOL dashboards should be reviewed actively during campaign periods and monthly otherwise. Leadership dashboards warrant a monthly review with a quarterly deep-dive.
Set benchmarks before you start tracking. A metric without a target is just a number. Before each quarter, establish internal benchmarks for your primary KPIs based on historical performance and, where available, industry benchmarks for your vertical on XHS.
Localize your reporting language. If your team includes both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking members, build bilingual metric labels into your templates from day one. This is particularly important for brands working with local XHS agencies or in-market teams in China.
Audit your dashboards quarterly. XHS regularly updates its advertising features, analytics capabilities, and platform mechanics. A quarterly audit ensures your dashboards reflect current platform realities and your current business priorities — not the objectives you had six months ago.
Connect insights to action. The best dashboard is one that ends with a decision. Whether that's a content brief change, a budget reallocation, or a new KOL tier to test, every reporting cycle should have at least one concrete output. Without that discipline, even the most beautiful custom dashboard becomes just another thing to look at.
Conclusion {#conclusion}
XHS analytics are genuinely powerful — but only for teams that know exactly which signals belong to them. A custom reporting framework built around your content team, paid media team, KOL team, and leadership isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a brand that reacts to data and one that's driven by it.
Start with the native Professional Account dashboard, build role-specific views around the metrics that drive each team's decisions, and layer in third-party tools as your sophistication grows. The brands scaling successfully on Xiaohongshu aren't the ones tracking the most metrics — they're the ones who know precisely which three or four numbers to act on each week.
For more XHS marketing resources, frameworks, and ready-to-use tools across 20+ industries, explore the AllXHS free resources library — or dive deeper into industry-specific Xiaohongshu strategies tailored to your brand's vertical.
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Ready to build an XHS analytics setup that actually works for your team?
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