PPC Case Study: How Endesa cut CPC by 12% in a highly competitive search market

Endesa and iProspect partnered with Adthena to navigate a fiercely competitive paid search market where chasing maximum coverage was no longer efficient. By using competitor CPC benchmarks to refine bidding strategy, the team reduced CPC by 12% and delivered 21% in cost savings, while protecting CPA and improving the overall quality of leads generated.

Endesa, one of Spain’s leading energy providers, operates in a highly competitive paid search environment where aggressive bidding across high-intent terms can quickly drive up acquisition costs.

As competitive pressure intensified, the team faced a clear strategic challenge: continuing to push for maximum coverage was increasing CPCs without delivering proportional gains in performance, putting CPA under growing pressure.
Holding top positions across the territory was becoming increasingly inefficient, but reducing bids carried its own risk of losing visibility to better-funded competitors at key moments.

Without clear visibility into what competitors were actually paying for those clicks, every bidding adjustment relied more on estimation than market-backed evidence.

The team needed precise competitor intelligence to understand how far CPCs could be reduced without sacrificing strategically valuable traffic, and when to make those adjustments against peaks in competitor activity.

Endesa and iProspect used Adthena to benchmark the average CPC competitors were paying within the targeted keyword group, helping transform bidding strategy from intuition into a data-driven approach.

Rather than defending maximum coverage at any cost, the team could identify where rising CPCs were no longer delivering sufficient return and adjust bids accordingly, helping improve efficiency across the keyword territory. Adthena’s competitor intelligence also made it possible to identify periods of heightened competitive activity, ensuring adjustments could be timed precisely against changing market conditions. This shifted Endesa from a reactive bidding posture to a deliberate, efficiency-led strategy in a territory where blanket coverage no longer paid off.

The result was a more disciplined approach to spend allocation: reducing investment in lower-efficiency positions, while protecting budget against the inflationary effect of competitor bidding wars.