Click through rate manipulation is a fraudulent activity that is considered a black hat SEO technique. The website owners typically deploy bots or fake users to increase the number of clicks on their website, thus increasing the CTR.

It makes the website seem popular and helps it rank higher in search results.

CTR fraud can put your website at the risk of heavy penalties because it is a form of cheating the search engine algorithms for ranking towards the top.

How Does CTR Manipulation Work?

It works in two ways:

1. Using Bots

Bots are simple programs that punch in a keyword in search engines and then click on your website. They keep doing this for all the keywords you list for, thus boosting your CTR.

2. Employing Humans

Website owners sometimes hire people to boost their CTRs. While it is still a fraudulent method to improve a website ranking, people are capable of browsing a website making the manipulation seem completely normal.

5 Ways to Manipulate CTR

The effectiveness of CTR manipulation depends on how well the exercise is done.

1. CTR Manipulation Bots

As discussed earlier, bots are straightforward software programs designed to increase the traffic on a particular webpage of your website. Bots use IP proxies to remain undiscoverable as they increase the CTR of your website, as this method is not considered honest.

All you need to do is determine the keywords that each bot will use to search for your website in a search engine. The bots then go to search engines and use your keywords to perform a search. When the bots discover your website, they open the webpage you programmed them for, thus increasing your website traffic.

Since search engines consider website traffic as a key factor for ranking, there is a chance for your website to rank higher using click through rate manipulation with bots.

The efficacy of using bots as a CTR manipulation service depends on how well the bot does its job. Leaving footprints behind could expose that you manipulated the boost in your CTR, and your website could be penalized for it.

It all depends on selecting a bot from the right creators. Most of the time, bots do not deliver the expected results from the CTR manipulation activity. Check the reputation of the CTR manipulation service that provides you with bots.

2. Paid Ads

Paid ads are marketing and advertising campaigns on search engines that can be searched using keywords. Paid ads require a higher marketing budget but are an effective way to attract more traffic to a landing page. These campaigns are designed to attract more traffic to your website by showing the consumers ad copies that are convincing enough to click on.

This is not really a cost-effective method to increase the traffic on your website, but when designed right, paid ads work well. With that said, you can manipulate the paid ad metrics, too. Using the same concept as earlier, bots are deployed online to search for the keywords employed in all your paid ad campaigns.

When the bots discover your URL, they click on it and arrive at the landing page. By mimicking the behavior of a human being casually browsing a website, the bots can make it look like genuine traffic.

It is, however, important to note that the boost in CTR observed by using black hat techniques is temporary. The only long-term solution to increase CTR and sustain higher numbers is to employ organic SEO strategies.

3. Using Micro Workers

Micro workers are people who can be hired to perform small tasks (in this case, clicking on website URLs). You can find a list of available micro workers on microworkers.com or on other websites such as gigbucks or Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Micro workers are actual humans who can do a more convincing job of increasing traffic on your website. The biggest benefit of employing micro workers is that you help a class of workers earn their keep while increasing the competitive clickthrough rate of your website.

Hiring micro workers to increase website traffic is not completely ethical, though, because the micro workers merely click on your website to increase CTR. You cannot count these clicks towards your business’s bottom line – they are merely helping you temporarily rank your website higher on search engines by boosting instantaneous CTR.

It is uncertain that your business will gain anything from CTR manipulation in this manner because, in the end, it is only faking a high volume of traffic on your website. You may rank higher, but what you do whilst at the top is what truly dictates the benefit of CTR manipulation for you.

4. Push Notifications

Businesses in multiple industries employ push notifications to get more traffic to their website. For example, eCommerce applications use push notifications to announce the latest deals, offers, and discounts. This already fetches a good volume of organic traffic to your website.

A recent survey by CleverTap found that push notifications have a CTR of 4.06% on Android devices and 1.7% on Apple devices. In the same survey, it is mentioned that you can boost the push notification CTR by 9% just by personalizing them.

Another tactic to boost CTR using push notifications is to insert rich media in the messages, which captures user attention and tempts them to click on the message. An Airship report establishes that this tactic helps boost user reaction rates to push notifications by 25%.

Push notifications can be considered an ethical way of getting traffic to the website. However, they may be intrusive and distracting for your audience. On Android systems, push notifications are permitted by default, whereas on iOS devices, permission is needed. Respecting user privacy is the first rule you must understand to prevent overdoing push messaging. Perhaps this is the reason why CTRs are so low on iOS devices.

5. Email Campaigns

An Ascend report states that improving email CTR is a battle for 53% of marketers.

Emails are considered the best tools for marketing even today. An average person checks his emails every single day, and this is what you can leverage to improve your email CTR. This is an important metric to track the performance of your email campaigns, which is why most marketers are obsessed with increasing email CTRs.

The best way to manipulate CTR through emails is to add relevant content to your mail. Remember, a user never clicks on things he does not want to see. Relevant content gives your users a reason to give that email a chance and click on it.

The second way to manipulate email CTR is to carefully choose who you send the emails. Superoffice conducted a survey where it sent two emails with the exact same subject line and body but sent it to two different cohorts – one classified and segmented for the product, and one general cohort with many people in.

The second email garnered a healthy 3.45% CTR. However, the first one – the email sent to the relevant cohort – had a CTR of almost 39%!

Websites That Offer Click Through Rate Manipulation  Services

If you are looking for CTR manipulation services, consider the following websites.

1. Hybrid Traffic

Hybrid traffic is one of the best websites to access if you need a CTR manipulation tool. This website provides you with a human workforce to provide you with the clicks you need for your website. This arrangement is inherently better than bots or software because human traffic and website behavior are more convincing for search algorithms to believe.

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You can also track whether or not your workforce is performing its job well by way of a mobile application. Tracking is possible because Hybrid Traffic prohibits the use of VPNs for its clickers and verifies each IP and location.

You may need to provide Hybrid Traffic with some basic information to start using their CTR manipulation services.

2. SERPClix

If you are looking to generate some high-quality clicks on your website, SerpClix is your option. This website provides a human workforce to click on your website in exchange for a fee.

However, this workforce goes the extra mile to make it look convincing. It spends time on your website, opening different pages, and interacting with different elements to improve your website’s user metrics as well.

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SerpClix does not provide any software or bots for the job because they may be subject to penalties, and because humans do a better job. The cherry on top is that the human clickers you source from this website are from your own country.

3. SERP Empire

This specialized website provides you with CTR manipulation tools to get your website to rank higher. SERP Empire believes that great content cannot fetch organic traffic by itself – that it needs to get more clicks, and your website needs to be near the top first.

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They help your website get geotargeted traffic from disparate locations across the globe, helping you quickly rise to the top ranks. You can build on your organic traffic strategies from there, creating a positive, organic cycle of boosting CTR.

This initial head start is essential for many businesses to get the ball rolling.

4. CrowdSearch

CrowdSearch is a website that has waiting lists for new account sign-ups – that is how sought-after this platform is. This website brings you the capability to boost your CTR from real people – not bots, software or micro workers. It helps you send a broadcast to the volunteers across the globe that you need clicks on your website.

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The best benefit of using this website is that it combines dwell time with CTR – something that all search engines look for when discerning bot traffic from real, organic traffic. By requesting real people to give you clicks, the dwell time automatically improves, and so does the CTR.

5. Rank-Fortress

Rank-Fortress advertises itself as a web development service. However, their CTR manipulation service is available at $279 a month. You can purchase this CTR manipulation pack that remains active for a month after activation.

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This module works like a training regime that helps you learn more about the workings of CTR and how you can improve it. This is perhaps the biggest advantage of using Rank-Fortress: you get a CTR manipulation service and a lot of resources to learn from.

Consider Rank-Fortress if you want to focus more on ranking on Google.

Conclusion

CTR manipulation is in the spotlight today – there are sects of professionals arguing that it works, and then there are sects that say it doesn’t.

With that said, the fact that any kind of manipulation is not “organic” and is not sustainable does weigh down on click through rate manipulation. If you have a consistent strategy with CTR manipulation that you commit to, it may turn into an advantageous situation over the long term. However, boosting CTR may not be the best idea for the momentary kick of high traffic volumes.

For the long term, putting a safe CTR manipulation strategy in place would help you steadily increase your traffic volume while keeping the search engine algorithms pacified as well.

All in all, click through rate manipulation is pretty gray.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Click Through Rate?

Click through rate is a website performance metric. It is a mathematical ratio between two parameters:

• The visitors clicking on a website URL
• The total number of visitors who have visited that page or link

In simpler words, click through rate can be defined as the percentage of impressions that were responsible for a click on a URL.

Businesses track their CTR to understand the content that users are clicking on, and adjust their SEO strategies accordingly. Higher click through rates enable a business to rank higher on search engines, which ultimately helps them create a positive, organic loop of traffic.

2. Why is CTR Important in SEO?

CTR impacts several aspects of a website in the background.

• Websites secure a position for their paid ads on the search results based on Ad Rank. Ad rank is heavily influenced by CTR – the better the CTR, the better the position of your ad
• CTR impacts your website’s quality score. Based on the ad relevance and expected click through rate that the search algorithm calculates for your page, your quality score is determined, which impacts your ranking
• CTR also hints at the popularity of your webpage, which is a significant factor in ranking well in search results

3. What is a Good CTR value?

A good CTR value is variable. It depends on factors such as:

• Industry
• Keywords
• PPC campaigns

A general rule of thumb is that the broader, more common keywords would have a relatively lower clickthrough rate as compared to highly specific, branded keywords. Click through rates also depends on the channel you are leveraging for communications. Emails have lower customer retention as compared to SMS.