Today’s marketers are awash with data. From campaign metrics to heatmaps, CRM insights to keyword gaps, there’s no shortage of tools promising to unlock the full picture of your audience.
But in reality, no single platform tells the whole story. The key lies in understanding what each tool excels at, and how to use them together to see the complete user journey—from search intent to sale.
Among the most widely used tools by modern marketing teams are Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Hotjar, HubSpot, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SurferSEO. Each brings a distinct lens to your digital performance—helping you not just gather data, but connect insights to action.
GA4: The “What” and the “How Often”
GA4, Google’s upgraded analytics platform, is built on an event-based model. It captures what people are doing on your site—how often they visit, where they land, how long they stay, and where they drop off.
It’s a powerful tool to spot behavioral trends and traffic flows. But GA4 doesn’t explain why users leave or who they are beyond device and source. It’s about patterns, not personas. That’s where the next tools step in.
Hotjar: The “Why” Behind the Behavior
Hotjar complements GA4 with qualitative insights—heatmaps, scroll tracking, and session recordings. It helps you understand how users experience your site.
Hotjar uncovers friction. Why is no one clicking your hero CTA? Why are users rage-clicking a broken element? GA4 won’t show you that. But Hotjar does.
Still, Hotjar is anonymous—it won’t tell you who that user is or what campaign brought them there. That’s where HubSpot takes the baton.
HubSpot: The “Who” and the Funnel Story
HubSpot connects behavioral data to identity. It maps a user’s journey across emails, forms, ads, pages, and nurturing workflows.
You can see:
- Which content is converting the highest-quality leads
- What journey a specific user took from awareness to conversion
- Which campaigns are pushing leads deeper into the funnel
But HubSpot doesn’t visualize on-site behavior like Hotjar or give the macro lens that GA4 does. And none of these tools truly cover what happens before the user ever lands on your site.
That’s where SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SurferSEO come in.
SEMrush & Ahrefs: The “What’s Missing and What’s Working” in SEO
SEMrush and Ahrefs are best-in-class tools for organic visibility, keyword discovery, backlink strategy, and competitor benchmarking.
They help you answer:
What are your competitors ranking for that you’re not?
Which content brings in the most organic traffic?
What keyword gaps are you missing in your content strategy?
Are your backlinks building authority or weighing you down?
While both tools have overlapping functions, SEMrush tends to focus more on holistic digital marketing (ads, social, site audits), while Ahrefs is razor-sharp on backlink profiles, keyword gaps, and site health.
But while these tools show what to write about, they don’t guide you on how to write it—that’s where SurferSEO shines.
SurferSEO: The “How to Win the SERP” Tool
SurferSEO bridges the gap between SEO insights and content creation. It analyzes top-ranking pages for a keyword and tells you what to include in your content to compete—right down to word count, headings, image usage, and keyword frequency.
It helps you create content that’s not just engaging, but search-optimized from day one. SurferSEO doesn’t replace great writing, but it ensures great writing performs better on Google.
In short: SEMrush & Ahrefs = What to write and why, SurferSEO = How to write it to rank
The Real Power: Connecting the Dots
- GA4 shows what’s happening on your site.
- Hotjar reveals how users behave and where they struggle.
- HubSpot identifies who they are and what journey they’re on.
- SEMrush/Ahrefs uncover what your audience is searching for and how you stack up.
- SurferSEO helps you execute content that aligns with search intent and algorithmic expectations.
Together, they give you a 360° view—search intent to on-site behavior to conversion outcomes. But when used in isolation or without a cohesive strategy, they can lead to disjointed insights, duplicated efforts, and missed opportunities.
How Ekakshar Helps Brands Use These Tools with Purpose
At Ekakshar, we don’t just “use tools.” We build content and performance strategies through them. Our strength lies in stitching together data from GA4, Hotjar, HubSpot, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SurferSEO to create a single, coherent narrative for your brand.
Whether you need full-funnel messaging, editorial strategy, SEO-driven storytelling, or UX-backed content audits, we make sure your data doesn’t live in dashboards—it lives in your decisions.
Final Thoughts
In today’s landscape, it’s not about using more tools—it’s about using the right ones in the right way.
When your data speaks in one voice, your marketing does too.
Don’t just measure performance. Design it—with the tools, the story, and the strategy that moves your brand forward.
