Note the post you're discussing explicitly says "SERP CTR":
"It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings."
We can see they're measuring it, it's obviously at least worth investigating as a signal, I'd be absolutely astounded if they aren't using it.
(I'm also a little surprised at Matt's continued insistence that the search team don't use CTR data from the Adwords and/or Analytics teams data. As a user-of-search, I'd like them to use _all_ available signals, and I suspect the Google Analytics data contains information which would noticeably improve the quality of search results).
It would probably be illegal. Google is the dominant player in both the analytics and the search space, using it's dominance in one area to strengthen in dominance in another would practically be asking for an anti-trust suit.
Plus it's incredibly easy to rig google analytics data, you can just modify the GA javascript you're serving.
"It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings."
We can see they're measuring it, it's obviously at least worth investigating as a signal, I'd be absolutely astounded if they aren't using it.
(I'm also a little surprised at Matt's continued insistence that the search team don't use CTR data from the Adwords and/or Analytics teams data. As a user-of-search, I'd like them to use _all_ available signals, and I suspect the Google Analytics data contains information which would noticeably improve the quality of search results).