Telescope for Craft CMS
Telescope Documentation
Telescope answers the question editors actually ask — how is this page doing? — without making them leave Craft, learn the GA4 interface, or be given a Google account at all.
Open an entry and you see its page views, visitors, sessions, engagement, traffic sources and referrers, for that entry’s URL. Telescope is free, requires Craft CMS 5 and PHP 8.2+, and has no runtime dependencies: it talks to the Google Analytics Data API directly.
Getting started
There are two things to do: install the plugin, then connect it to your GA4 property. After that, decide where reports should appear.
Installation
Requirements, Composer, and installing the plugin.
Connecting to GA4
Create a service account, grant it access, and enter the property ID.
Usage
The Analytics field, the entry sidebar, the Telescope section, the widget and the print view.
Configuration
Every setting, what it does and what it defaults to.
Multi-site
Per-site properties, or one shared property with hostname filtering.
Permissions
Who can see reports.
Console commands
Diagnostics, one-off reports, cache warming and clearing.
Twig API
Surfacing the same numbers on the front end.
Troubleshooting
Empty reports, credential errors and quota problems.
How page matching works
Telescope reports on the page path of an element’s URL: https://example.com/about/ becomes /about. Trailing slashes are trimmed and query strings dropped, because a GA4 exact match on /about/ will not find hits recorded against /about.
If reports come back empty for a page you know gets traffic, this is nearly always why — see Troubleshooting.
Caching and quota
Every report section is a separate Data API call, so a full report costs six. Reports are cached for ten minutes by default and served from cache thereafter; failures are never cached, so fixing a credential problem takes effect immediately. On a busy site, run telescope/analytics/warm from cron and lower the number of enabled sections.