Meta ads that brought 2.5× more clicks to War Child’s auction
Client
War Child
Year
2026
Industry
Non-profit
Services
Growth
Tech Stack
War Child supports children growing up in war with psychosocial support, education and protection. For its annual charity auction on Tradera, War Child brought in Souk to run paid social on a small non-profit budget. We built a Meta campaign around the auction’s strongest organic content and let the algorithm scale what worked. It drove nearly 6,000 clicks in under two weeks, at less than 1 kr per click: 2.5× more clicks than War Child’s 2024 Meta ads on the same spend.
Challenges
Every autumn, Swedish artists, musicians and athletes donate personal items to War Child’s charity auction on Tradera. For the 2026 auction, more than 20 items were up for auction, including a signed stage jacket from Teddybears, football gear from Nahir Besara and a lithograph by Dregen.
The auction was only live for two weeks, and the media budget was a fraction of what a commercial brand would put behind a launch. War Child had strong content and an engaged following, but organic posts on Meta reach only a fraction of followers, and almost no one beyond them. Every krona had to work hard, with no time for a slow ramp-up.
Solutions
Strategy
We didn’t make new creative. Instead we ran the campaign on War Child’s existing posts. That kept every like, comment and share attached to the ad, so people saw real social proof from the first impression. A brand-new ad starts without that. Every ad sent people straight to the auction on Tradera, one click from placing a bid..
Budget allocation
All ads sat in one campaign with campaign budget optimization. That let Meta’s delivery system shift spend in real time toward the posts and placements that drove the most clicks. In a two-week window, there’s no time to hand-pick winners and rebuild.
Content and formats
War Child produced the content under their “IKONISKT” concept: one donated item and the person behind it in each post. Close to 20 posts went out during the auction, featuring Teddybears, Kent, Titiyo, Dregen, Thåström and The Hives. They ran as Reels, static images and carousels across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. That gave the algorithm a wide pool of names, items and formats to test against each other. The Reels, with artists and athletes presenting their own items on camera, carried the reach.
Result
Bids happened on Tradera, outside our tracking, so we measured what the campaign could control: getting qualified traffic to the auction. On a small budget, the campaign drove nearly 6,000 clicks at under 1 kr each. That’s 2.5× more clicks and 78% more views than War Child’s 2024 Meta campaign on the same spend. Click-through rate was around 5%, nearly 3× the Facebook average and higher than every industry benchmark. Video drove the most reach, but who was in the post and what they donated moved clicks just as much as format. Everyone who engaged also became a warm audience for War Child’s Christmas campaign.
2.5× more
Clicks for the same spend as 2024
78% more
Views for the same spend as 2024
Nearly 3× more
Clicks than an average Facebook ad
