If you are planning to advertise on Xiaohongshu (小红书) — also known as RED or Little Red Book — one of the first questions you will ask is: how much does it actually cost? More specifically, what is a realistic cost-per-click (CPC) benchmark, and how does it compare to other paid channels in your media mix?

These are not simple questions. Xiaohongshu’s advertising ecosystem is maturing rapidly, and CPC rates in 2025 vary considerably depending on your industry, ad format, audience targeting parameters, and campaign objectives. For brands entering the Chinese market — or reaching Chinese-speaking consumers across Southeast Asia — understanding these benchmarks is essential to building a budget that delivers measurable returns.

This guide breaks down average Xiaohongshu CPC benchmarks for 2025, examines what drives costs up or down, compares performance against other major platforms, and offers actionable strategies to help you get more from every dollar spent on RED. Whether you are running your first Xiaohongshu campaign or optimising an existing one, these insights will sharpen your approach.

What Is CPC in the Context of Xiaohongshu Advertising?

Cost-per-click (CPC) refers to the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on their ad. On Xiaohongshu, this metric applies primarily to performance-driven ad formats within the platform’s native advertising system, known as Juguang (聚光) — the official self-serve advertising platform that RED launched to give brands greater control over paid placements, audience targeting, and campaign measurement.

Within Juguang, advertisers can bid on a CPC basis for objectives including profile visits, website traffic, and lead generation. This bidding model makes CPC a central performance indicator for brands focused on driving direct engagement rather than pure reach or impressions. It is worth noting that Xiaohongshu also supports CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) and CPE (cost-per-engagement) pricing models, so your choice of objective directly influences which cost metric becomes most relevant to your campaign.

Understanding CPC on Xiaohongshu also requires appreciating the platform’s unique content environment. Unlike traditional display advertising networks, RED is built around highly trusted, search-driven discovery. Users actively seek recommendations, making click intent generally higher than on purely social-feed platforms. This dynamic has real implications for how CPC translates into downstream value — a click on Xiaohongshu often carries stronger purchase intent than a click on a more passive scrolling environment.

Average CPC Benchmarks on Xiaohongshu in 2025

Based on aggregated campaign data and industry reporting available heading into 2025, the average CPC on Xiaohongshu sits in the range of RMB 3 to RMB 15 (approximately USD 0.40 to USD 2.10), with significant variation depending on category, targeting specificity, and ad format. Entry-level campaigns targeting broader audiences in lower-competition categories tend to sit toward the lower end of this range, while premium lifestyle, beauty, and luxury categories regularly exceed RMB 10 per click.

It is important to treat these figures as directional benchmarks rather than fixed rates. Xiaohongshu’s auction-based system means CPC is determined dynamically by competition within any given audience segment. Brands running during peak commercial periods — such as Double 11, 618, or Chinese New Year — will typically see CPC rates rise by 30 to 60 percent above baseline as more advertisers compete for the same eyeballs. Conversely, brands willing to test during off-peak windows often find significantly more cost-efficient inventory.

For brands operating through a Xiaohongshu marketing partner, these benchmarks provide a useful starting point for budget planning — but experienced practitioners will always layer in category-specific data, historical account performance, and platform-specific creative quality scores before committing to a target CPC.

CPC by Industry: Which Categories Cost More?

Industry vertical is one of the strongest predictors of CPC on Xiaohongshu. The platform’s user base skews heavily toward young, urban, aspirational female consumers — a demographic that is fiercely competed over by beauty, fashion, food and beverage, mother-and-baby, and travel brands. The following benchmarks reflect typical CPC ranges observed across major advertising categories:

• Beauty and Skincare: RMB 8–20 per click — consistently the most competitive vertical on RED, driven by intense brand rivalry and high purchase intent among core users.
• Fashion and Apparel: RMB 6–15 per click — strong visual content performs well but competition remains fierce, particularly during seasonal campaigns.
• Food and Beverage: RMB 4–10 per click — lower average CPC but often used for brand awareness objectives, so click volume may not directly correlate with conversion.
• Mother and Baby: RMB 7–18 per click — a high-trust, high-intent category where users research extensively before purchasing, making qualified clicks particularly valuable.
• Travel and Hospitality: RMB 5–12 per click — seasonal spikes are pronounced, with Golden Week and summer holidays driving significant CPC inflation.
• Health and Wellness: RMB 6–14 per click — growing category, particularly post-pandemic, with increased brand investment pushing costs upward.
• Consumer Electronics: RMB 5–11 per click — lower than beauty but still meaningful, especially for tech products targeting younger demographics.

These ranges are illustrative. The actual CPC your campaigns achieve will also depend on landing page quality, creative relevance scores, and how precisely your targeting aligns with Xiaohongshu’s audience data. Broad targeting can suppress CPC but at the cost of relevance; tight targeting improves intent but pushes bids higher.

Key Factors That Affect Your Xiaohongshu CPC

Several interconnected variables determine where your actual CPC lands within — or outside — the benchmarks above. Understanding these levers gives you real control over campaign economics rather than simply accepting market rates.

Ad format and placement. Xiaohongshu offers multiple ad formats including in-feed image ads, video ads, search ads (keyword-based placements within the platform’s search results), and branded content collaboration formats. Search ads on Xiaohongshu typically carry higher CPCs due to their explicit intent-matching nature, similar to the premium that Google Search commands over display. Video ads can vary widely — high-quality short-form video often achieves lower CPC through better engagement rates, while low-quality video may underperform on both cost and conversion.

Audience targeting precision. Juguang allows advertisers to target by demographics, interests, behaviours, device type, geographic location, and even lookalike audiences built from existing customer data. Narrower audience definitions generally increase CPC because you are competing in a smaller, more contested pool. However, the payoff is typically higher conversion rates downstream. As a rule of thumb, test both broad and refined audience configurations before committing budget to either extreme.

Creative quality and relevance score. Like most major ad platforms, Xiaohongshu’s algorithm rewards ads that resonate with users. Higher engagement rates — saves, likes, comments, and shares — signal quality and can reduce your effective CPC over time. Ads that look native to the platform’s organic content style (authentic, aspirational, visually clean) consistently outperform overtly commercial creative. This is one reason why brands integrating influencer marketing content into their paid amplification strategies often see better CPC performance than brands using purely brand-produced assets.

Bidding strategy and budget pacing. Juguang supports both manual and automated bidding. Automated bidding optimises toward a target CPA or CPC over time and can smooth out cost volatility, but it requires sufficient historical data to perform well. Manual bidding gives you immediate control and is generally recommended for new campaigns where you are still calibrating your benchmark expectations.

Seasonality and competitive windows. As noted earlier, major shopping festivals dramatically inflate CPC across all categories. Planning campaigns to run in the two to three weeks before a key shopping window — rather than during it — often delivers better cost efficiency while still capturing purchase-intent momentum as users research ahead of sale events.

Xiaohongshu CPC vs. Other Platforms: How Does It Compare?

Placing Xiaohongshu CPC benchmarks in context requires comparing them to the platforms brands typically consider alongside RED in their China or Greater China media plans. Broadly speaking, Xiaohongshu sits in a mid-range position — more expensive than broad-reach platforms like Bilibili at its lower end, but considerably more cost-efficient than Baidu search for competitive commercial keywords.

Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) tends to offer lower average CPCs in the RMB 2–8 range for in-feed video, driven by the sheer volume of its user base and inventory supply. However, Douyin’s algorithm-driven, passive discovery model means click intent can be lower than on Xiaohongshu, where users are often in an active research or shopping mindset. Weibo sits in a similar CPC range to Douyin but skews toward mass-market awareness campaigns rather than performance-focused objectives.

For brands weighing Xiaohongshu against broader digital investments, the more meaningful comparison may not be raw CPC but rather cost-per-qualified-lead or cost-per-conversion. RED’s high-trust, peer-recommendation environment frequently delivers superior downstream conversion rates, meaning a higher CPC on Xiaohongshu can still yield a better return on ad spend than a lower CPC on a platform with weaker purchase intent. This is a nuance that AI-powered marketing strategies increasingly help brands model and quantify across their full channel mix.

Practical Tips to Reduce CPC and Improve ROAS on Xiaohongshu

Knowing the benchmarks is only the first step. The more valuable question is: how do you consistently perform below benchmark while maintaining or improving your conversion outcomes? Here are the most effective strategies based on how high-performing brands approach Xiaohongshu paid media.

• Invest in native-style creative: Ads that look and feel like organic Xiaohongshu posts consistently achieve higher quality scores, which reduces effective CPC through better ad auction positioning. Prioritise authentic imagery, honest product storytelling, and formats that mirror what users already save and share.
• Leverage search ad placements strategically: While search ads carry higher CPCs, they capture users at peak intent moments. Using a blended approach — lower-CPC in-feed ads for awareness, search ads for conversion — optimises your overall cost structure.
• Build and test lookalike audiences: Uploading existing customer data to Juguang enables lookalike targeting, which typically delivers stronger engagement and conversion rates than interest-based targeting alone, improving your effective return on every click.
• Use UGC and influencer content as paid creative: Content originally created by KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) or KOCs (Key Opinion Consumers) on Xiaohongshu can be amplified as paid posts through the platform’s Spotlight (星推) programme, combining organic credibility with paid reach for lower effective CPC.
• Optimise landing experiences: Whether driving traffic to a brand profile, a product detail page, or an external site, the post-click experience matters. Slow-loading pages or mismatched messaging between ad and landing destination inflates your effective cost-per-outcome even when CPC appears healthy.
• Run continuous A/B tests on creative and copy: Xiaohongshu’s platform rewards iterative improvement. Rotating creative variants and testing different headline approaches generates the performance data needed to progressively lower your CPC over time.

These strategies compound over time. Brands that approach Xiaohongshu advertising with a test-and-learn mindset — rather than expecting fixed outcomes from a set-and-forget campaign — consistently outperform benchmark CPC rates and achieve stronger ROAS. This is precisely why partnering with an agency that has platform-specific expertise and data infrastructure makes a measurable difference, particularly for brands scaling investment beyond initial test budgets.

Is Xiaohongshu Advertising Worth the Investment?

For brands targeting young, urban, purchase-ready consumers in China — or reaching Chinese-speaking audiences across Singapore, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia — Xiaohongshu advertising represents a compelling opportunity in 2025. The platform’s combination of search-like intent, peer-recommendation trust, and a highly engaged user base of over 300 million registered users (with monthly active users consistently above 200 million) creates an advertising environment where qualified clicks carry genuine downstream value.

The honest answer to whether it is worth it depends heavily on your category, creative quality, targeting strategy, and how well your broader marketing funnel is set up to convert RED-driven traffic. Brands that treat Xiaohongshu as an isolated paid channel rarely achieve their potential — the platform’s greatest ROI comes when paid amplification is integrated with an organic content strategy, influencer collaborations, and a consistent brand presence that reinforces the trust users place in peer recommendations.

If you are just beginning to explore Xiaohongshu marketing, starting with a structured test campaign — defined budget, clear KPIs, and a commitment to iterate on learnings — is far more valuable than attempting to launch a fully scaled campaign without benchmark data specific to your brand and category. The CPC benchmarks in this guide give you a credible starting framework, but the most useful benchmarks will always be the ones your own campaigns generate over time.

Final Thoughts

Xiaohongshu CPC benchmarks in 2025 range broadly from RMB 3 to RMB 20 depending on industry, ad format, targeting strategy, and campaign timing. Beauty and skincare remain the most competitive — and costly — category, while food and beverage and consumer electronics offer more accessible entry points. Across all categories, the key to efficient CPC performance lies in creative quality, audience precision, and the integration of paid activity with a coherent organic and influencer strategy on the platform.

Understanding these benchmarks is the foundation. Building a campaign structure that consistently beats them — through smarter creative, better audience data, and continuous optimisation — is where real competitive advantage is created. For brands serious about performance on Xiaohongshu, the difference between average and exceptional results is almost always found in the details of execution rather than the size of the budget.