Great info! I'll definitely take this into account. If I wanted to measure 'Time Spent on Modal', would I need to set an s.tl call for the overall modal I described above and what would the logic be around that?

No, the modal itself doesn't need to set an s.tl call, just on the click of the hotspot image within the modal.

The hover tracking is actually within a pop-up Ajax style modal on the page itself and isn't part of a new s.t request. Does that matter?

No, we're not currently using DTM, so I would need to know a solution using cookies.

Our business team is adding a modal that has an image with different hotspots that a user can hover over and reveals information. I'm only wanting to set a custom link upon the first 'hover' of the image, to cut down on the number of requests and will still give the business an idea of the 'interact...

In this case, we'd like the ability to utilize the 'Instances' metric instead of 'Page Views' for the alert.

Currently, you only have the ability to view alerts based on the Page Views metric for a given Custom Traffic report. Because we utilize custom link tracking, we'd like to have the ability to adjust the metric so that it's not always using Page Views.