I just had reason to log into a property using GA and was offered to "upgrade" to GA 4. I hadn't even heard of it
It seems like it offers mostly features for people running ads and/or doing ecomm, but it looks like it offers some things for a content site
QuoteCodeless Event tracking. Expanded codeless features make it easier for marketers to track and measure on-site and in-app actions that matter — in real-time — such as a page scroll or video play, without having to add code or set up event tracking in Google Tag Manager.
Page scroll is a metric I like to look at, but hate having to set up an event (or install Crazy Egg or the like) to do it.
https://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-4-adds-new-integrations-with-ads-ai-powered-insights-and-predictions-342048
It's the same thing as the App+Web property that they've been touting for a while. I'd written it off because I don't have native apps. My mistake. It's Google adjusting to a world of browsers and European law making cookies unreliable for analytics. They're also throwing in unsampled reports and export to BigQuery for free. You used to have to have GA 360 for those. The real killer is the new server-side Google Tag Manager functionality, which has also just come out of beta: One snippet of GA or GTM code on your website which fires events to a cloud-based GTM container. That in turn passes the events on to GA, Facebook, Bing etc., without need any more client-side code. The whole lot's hidden behind your own subdomain so the cookies are first-party, the client-side snippet can be served first-party and nothing gets blocked by browsers. None of this is feature complete yet, but it's already very impressive.
Ah interesting. Bakedjake has been telling me for years to run GA server side as much as possible (but I've never done it).
Thanks for the perspective.