Xiaohongshu Ad Platform Tutorial: Navigate the Juguang Dashboard Like a Pro
Date Published
Table Of Contents
1. What Is the Xiaohongshu Ad Platform (Juguang)?
2. Prerequisites: Getting Access to Juguang
3. Understanding the Dashboard Layout
4. Campaign Structure: Account, Campaign, Ad Group, Creative
5. Ad Formats Available in Juguang
8. Performance Metrics to Monitor
9. Companion Tools: Shutiao, Pugongying, and Lingxi
10. Pro Tips for International Brands
If you've been marketing on Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote or Little Red Book) organically and are ready to invest in paid advertising, the first thing you'll encounter is Juguang (聚光) — the platform's enterprise-level advertising dashboard. For international brand marketers accustomed to Meta Ads Manager or Google Ads, Juguang will feel both familiar and distinctly different. It's powerful, data-rich, and built around Xiaohongshu's unique role as a platform where users come to research, discover, and buy. But it's also Chinese-language-first, requires verified business credentials, and comes with a campaign logic that rewards content quality as much as budget size.
This tutorial breaks down the Juguang dashboard from the ground up. Whether you're launching your first paid campaign on the platform or trying to understand what your China-based agency is doing with your media budget, this guide will give you the vocabulary, the structure, and the strategic context to navigate it with confidence.
What Is the Xiaohongshu Ad Platform (Juguang)? {#what-is-juguang}
Juguang (聚光), internally referred to as "Aurora" by the Xiaohongshu team, is Xiaohongshu's official advertising and data analytics platform. It is designed to help brands and e-commerce businesses maximize their reach and engagement on the platform through paid placements. Unlike a simple boosting tool, Juguang is a full-stack advertising solution that covers everything from campaign creation and audience targeting to real-time performance tracking and conversion optimization.
What makes Juguang distinct from Western advertising platforms is its foundational design philosophy. The platform is built around Xiaohongshu's dual role as both a content discovery engine and a product search tool, meaning ads are engineered to integrate with how users naturally browse and search rather than interrupt them. This is not an accident. Xiaohongshu's platform recorded almost 600 million daily search queries in late 2024, and over 40% of users actively search for product reviews when considering a purchase. Juguang is purpose-built to intercept that intent at every stage.
The platform supports two primary ad formats — In-Feed Ads (信息流广告) and Search Ads (搜索广告) — which together form the paid component of Xiaohongshu's official KFS marketing model (KOL content + Feed Ads + Search Ads). This model is designed to capture consumers across three phases: the Browse stage (浏览场), the Search stage (搜索场), and the Purchasing stage (消费场). Understanding this framework is critical before you touch any dashboard setting, because your campaign objective should always map back to which stage of the consumer journey you're targeting.
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Prerequisites: Getting Access to Juguang {#prerequisites}
Juguang is not a platform you can simply sign up for. Access requires completing several steps in the correct order, and international brands face a few additional hurdles worth knowing about upfront.
Step 1: Create and verify a Professional Account — To advertise on Xiaohongshu, businesses must first obtain a verified brand account, called a Professional Account (专业号) or Official Account. A Chinese business license is not mandatory for overseas businesses; a foreign business license can be used to register and verify an account. Supporting documents typically include business incorporation documents, trademark registration certificates, and any industry-specific certifications relevant to your product category (especially important for health, baby products, and food).
Step 2: Apply for advertising capabilities — Having a verified business account doesn't automatically grant advertising privileges. You must specifically apply for advertising capabilities through your enterprise dashboard by selecting "Advertising Services" and completing the additional qualification process. Verification typically takes 5–7 business days.
Step 3: Access Juguang and complete promotional qualification — Once your enterprise account is approved, visit ad.xiaohongshu.com to access the Juguang platform and activate ad buying. At this stage, Juguang also requires company verification via submitted business documentation, and certain regulated product categories require industry-specific certifications before campaigns can be approved.
Step 4: Fund your account — Juguang operates on a prepaid model. Before any campaign can go live, your account balance must be funded. Overseas companies working without a local partner will need to arrange this through their operating arrangement.
One important caveat for international teams: Juguang's interface is currently Chinese-only, and a functioning Juguang account can only be opened under a Chinese entity. This means most overseas brands work through a certified local agency or operating partner to manage the setup process and day-to-day campaign operations.
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Understanding the Dashboard Layout {#dashboard-layout}
Once you're inside Juguang, the dashboard is organized around a few core navigation areas. Here's how to orient yourself:
• Campaign Management (广告管理): The central workspace where you create, manage, and monitor all campaigns, ad groups, and individual ads. This is where you'll spend most of your time.
• Creative Library (素材库): A repository for your uploaded images, videos, and ad copy. Managing your creative assets here before launching a campaign streamlines the build process.
• Audience Management (人群管理): Where you build, save, and manage custom and lookalike audience segments for reuse across campaigns.
• Data Reports (数据报告): The analytics center, providing real-time and historical performance data at the account, campaign, ad group, and creative level. Juguang provides daily data reports that let you spot trends and make timely adjustments.
• Account Settings (账户设置): Billing, user access management, and account-level configurations.
The reporting dashboard is particularly valuable for international brands because it provides clear insights into what strategy is working regardless of language barriers in the interface. You can filter by date range, compare time periods, and break down performance by ad format, placement, or audience segment.
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Campaign Structure: Account, Campaign, Ad Group, Creative {#campaign-structure}
Juguang uses a three-tier campaign hierarchy that will feel familiar to anyone who has run ads on Meta or Google:
1. Campaign Level (推广计划) — This is where you define your marketing objective. Juguang supports objectives including brand awareness, traffic (profile visits or website clicks), engagement, lead generation, and conversion (store visits, purchases, or live stream traffic). Your campaign objective determines which bidding models and optimization options are available to you at lower levels, so choosing correctly here has downstream implications for your entire setup.
2. Ad Group Level (推广单元) — This is where targeting, budget, bidding, and scheduling are set. Each campaign can contain multiple ad groups, allowing you to test different audiences or budget allocations against the same objective. Creating segment-specific ad groups rather than targeting everyone with the same content is a best practice that consistently improves performance.
3. Ad/Creative Level (广告创意) — This is where your actual ad content lives, including the note (image or video), headline copy, call-to-action button, and destination link. Juguang supports A/B testing at this level, letting you run multiple creative variants within the same ad group to identify top performers.
A common best practice is to prepare 4–6 creative variations per ad group and refresh them every 7–10 days to prevent audience fatigue. Xiaohongshu's algorithm rewards ads that feel native to the platform's organic content style — user-generated aesthetic, conversational copy, and real-life scenarios consistently outperform overtly commercial creative.
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Ad Formats Available in Juguang {#ad-formats}
Juguang supports two core ad formats, each designed for different moments in the consumer journey:
In-Feed Ads (信息流广告) appear natively within Xiaohongshu's content discovery feed, blending with organic posts from accounts users follow and content recommended by the algorithm. The most effective Feed Ads are built on content that has already demonstrated organic traction — posts with high save rates, strong engagement, and positive comments — using paid promotion to extend that content's reach to broader audiences with similar interests and behaviors. This is the core principle behind the KFS model: Feed Ads amplify what is already working.
Search Ads (搜索广告) are displayed when users actively search for specific keywords, capturing high-intent audiences at the moment they're ready to research or buy. Because Xiaohongshu functions increasingly like a search engine — with over 40% of users preferring to make purchase decisions after conducting a search — Search Ads carry higher intent but also higher CPCs compared to Feed Ads. Using lower-CPC In-Feed Ads for awareness and higher-intent Search Ads for conversion is an effective way to optimize your cost structure across the funnel.
Beyond these two primary formats, Juguang also supports video stream placements, POI store components (linking users to your offline store information), and lead collection formats that embed inquiry forms or DM prompts directly into the ad unit.
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Audience Targeting Options {#audience-targeting}
Juguang's targeting capabilities are one of its strongest features, offering significantly more precision than most international brands expect from a Chinese social platform. Targeting dimensions available within the dashboard include:
• Demographics: Age, gender, city tier, and geographic location (including radius targeting around specific commercial districts at 3km, 5km, or 10km)
• Interests and Behaviors: Category interest tags (beauty, parenting, electronics, home goods, etc.), browsing behavior, purchase history, and search history
• Device Targeting: Device type and operating system
• Custom Audiences: Upload existing customer data to build lookalike audiences for targeting users with similar characteristics
• Competitor Audience Targeting: A newer feature that allows brands to target audiences associated with competitor accounts directly within Juguang
Juguang integrates search and browsing behaviors to target users with pinpoint accuracy, which is a significant advantage when your goal is measurable conversion rather than broad awareness. The platform's bidding principle is based on the eCPM model, calculated as: eCPM = Bid × Estimated CTR × Estimated Conversion Rate × 1,000. This means targeting quality, creative relevance, and bid amount all interact to determine ad placement — not just spend.
Audience targeting precision also directly affects cost. Broader targeting generally achieves lower CPMs, while narrow demographic and behavioral targeting increases costs. Finding the right balance between audience relevance and sufficient scale is a key optimization lever.
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Bidding Models Explained {#bidding-models}
Juguang supports multiple bidding models, and choosing the right one for your campaign objective is essential. Using the wrong model for your goal often results in inflated costs.
• CPM (Cost Per Mille): Pay per 1,000 impressions. Best suited for awareness campaigns where reach and visibility are the primary goal.
• CPC (Cost Per Click): Pay when users click your ad. Used for traffic objectives including profile visits, website visits, and lead generation.
• CPV (Cost Per View): Pay when users watch a significant portion of your video. Appropriate for video-first campaigns focused on product education or storytelling.
• oCPC (Optimized Cost Per Click): An advanced conversion-focused model that uses a real-time prediction mechanism to analyze conversion rates and competitors' bids, automatically adjusting the bid strategy to drive higher-quality traffic. This model requires sufficient conversion data to perform well — typically at least 10+ conversions per week for the algorithm to learn effectively.
• No Bid (Smart/Automatic Bidding): The platform automatically manages bids to maximize advertising effect within your set budget. Ideal for new campaigns without historical performance data.
Juguang also supports both manual bidding (which gives immediate control and is recommended for new campaigns) and automated bidding (which optimizes toward a target CPA or CPC over time but requires historical data to perform well). A practical approach for new accounts is to start with CPM bidding to build initial data, then transition to objective-specific models like oCPC once baseline performance is established.
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Performance Metrics to Monitor {#performance-metrics}
Juguang's data dashboard gives you real-time visibility into campaign performance across a range of standard and platform-specific metrics. The key indicators to track are:
• Impressions and Reach: Total ad exposures and unique users reached
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): A strong signal of creative relevance and audience fit
• CPC / CPM / CPE: Cost efficiency metrics that should be benchmarked against your industry (beauty and luxury brands typically see CPMs of 80–120 RMB; fashion and lifestyle average 50–80 RMB; FMCG categories can achieve 30–60 RMB)
• Engagement Rate: Saves, likes, comments, and shares — Xiaohongshu's algorithm rewards high engagement with preferential placement and lower effective CPMs over time
• Conversion Rate and CPA: For performance campaigns tied to store visits, lead forms, or purchases
• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): The ultimate measure of paid media efficiency
Juguang's optimization framework follows the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) for continuous iteration. This includes real-time data monitoring, campaign-level analysis, user persona insights, and material performance decay warnings that alert you when a creative is losing effectiveness. When a campaign plan continuously underperforms below a defined breakeven threshold, the system's recommendations signal when to pause, reallocate, or refresh.
A critical point for international brands: without proper conversion tracking — including Xiaohongshu pixel implementation and UTM parameters — you will be unable to attribute which ad or note drove a conversion, making optimization impossible and ROAS unmeasurable.
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Companion Tools: Shutiao, Pugongying, and Lingxi {#companion-tools}
Juguang doesn't operate in isolation. Three companion tools integrate with it to form Xiaohongshu's full commercial ecosystem:
Shutiao (薯条) is a lightweight content amplification tool available directly within the Xiaohongshu app, exclusive to verified business accounts. It allows brands to boost existing organic notes to a wider audience without the full complexity of a Juguang campaign. Shutiao is ideal for early-stage brand accounts that need steady reach while finding their content voice, and for testing which hooks or cover images perform best before committing to a larger paid push.
Pugongying (蒲公英) is Xiaohongshu's official influencer marketplace, bringing together a network of over 100,000 creators across 30 categories. It simplifies the process of finding KOLs and KOCs whose audience aligns with your brand, and manages contracts, deliverables, and performance data in a transparent, in-platform environment. The best-performing content from Pugongying collaborations is then eligible for amplification through Juguang Feed Ads — this is the KFS loop in action.
Lingxi (灵犀) is Xiaohongshu's brand marketing analytics center for tracking product (SPU) performance, content effectiveness, and growth metrics. It supports the AIPS Audience Asset Model, which measures audience influence depth across the full journey from awareness to purchase. Lingxi tools like the "Penetration Strategy" module allow brands to input total budgets and audience targets and receive automated touchpoint allocation recommendations — a powerful planning layer on top of Juguang's execution capabilities.
Together, these tools support a full-funnel marketing approach that no single dashboard section can provide on its own.
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Pro Tips for International Brands {#pro-tips}
Navigating Juguang as a non-Chinese-speaking marketer comes with real-world challenges that go beyond the technical. Here are actionable tips based on how experienced international brands operate on the platform:
• Work with a verified local partner. Foreign entities currently cannot open a Juguang account independently. Working with a certified local agency gives you both platform access and Chinese-language expertise for copywriting, compliance reviews, and creative localization.
• Lead with organic content before scaling paid. Xiaohongshu's algorithm evaluates paid and organic content using similar quality metrics. Ads that look native and have already proven organic engagement consistently outperform brand-produced commercial assets.
• Plan for industry-specific compliance early. Regulated categories including health, beauty, food, and mother & baby products require specific certifications before campaigns are approved. Preparing these documents upfront prevents launch delays.
• Adjust bids for major shopping festivals. Key events like 6.18 and Singles' Day typically require 20–30% higher bids to maintain competitive visibility during peak auction periods.
• Refresh creatives regularly. Rotating creative variants every 7–10 days and testing new headlines progressively lowers CPC over the campaign lifetime by preventing both audience fatigue and algorithm score decay.
Ready to Run Ads on Xiaohongshu?
The Juguang dashboard is more intuitive than it looks once you understand the underlying logic: campaigns are structured around consumer intent stages, creative quality matters as much as budget, and native-looking content will always outperform conventional ad formats on this platform. For international brands, the biggest unlock is combining solid organic content with a well-structured paid media plan — using Shutiao for early testing, Pugongying for influencer amplification, and Juguang for scaled, data-driven performance campaigns.
Of course, navigating a Chinese-language platform, securing the right business certifications, and building campaigns that resonate with Xiaohongshu's discerning community is a significant undertaking without the right support. That's exactly where AllXHS comes in.
At AllXHS, we're the #1 English-language resource hub for international brands marketing on Xiaohongshu, offering 378+ data-driven industry reports, a 21-module training academy, and 25+ ready-to-use tools and templates across 20+ verticals. Whether you need industry-specific Xiaohongshu marketing strategies or want to explore our free Xiaohongshu resources, we have everything you need to move from setup to scale.
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