When I tested Agency Assassin on some of my own projects what I discovered was it was very inconsistent as an example in the first month my rankings were improving (keep in mind I didn't do anything other than use AA). But then they seemed to stall out and even drop back down or less than previously.
So the next month I tested a few more personal projects and they did not improve but after about 3 months all the projects saw a big boost. What I have come to believe is there has to be some type of IP problem going on, when it works well it works very well but when it doesn't it doesn't work at all and actually can hurt your rankings.
CTR manipulation does work and Agency Assasin seems they continue to improve its system and is a pretty good blackhat tool when it comes to CTR manipulation.