Timer until Event Occurs - google-analytics

Question

Is there a way to track the time from when the "Window Loaded" event happens until a button is clicked on the page?
I tried several different things, like setting up a timer that would only fire if "Click Text" is "Download" but that doesn't stop the timer trigger from firing every second. I could never stop the timer on an event or a button click.
Brian

Answer 1

I found this answer from Simo about how to do this:
https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/tag-manager/xJ0RGC2wecY/rxmrJRklAgAJ
When you create a Universal Analytics tag, you need to add in all the required fields. Now you don't have any fields populated in your Timing hit so GA can't build any hit out of it.
You need to fill at least Category, Variable and Value fields: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/user-timings
But judging from the bit you wrote at the end of your latest response, I think you've kind of misunderstood how the timer trigger works.
The timer trigger STARTS a timer upon the page load (GTM's default timer) or any user interaction (my custom timer). You still need to specify a "stop" to the timer to calculate how long something took. Neither GTM's default timer or my timer trigger can help you in identifying how long something took. They can simply be used to measure IF something took X seconds, where X seconds is the interlap between "interval" and "limit".
If you want to know the number of milliseconds from when the page was first loaded in the browser to any interaction such as a click of a button, all you need is a Custom JS variable:
function() {
return window.performance && window.performance.timing ? (new Date().getTime())-window.performance.timing.domInteractive : undefined;
}
This variable would return the time delta in milliseconds between when the variable was invoked and when the current page first became available to the user. So if you want to create a Timing tag out of this, make the Timing tag fire on the click of the button, and then in the timing Value field add a reference to this variable. Thus you'll have a Timing tag that sends the duration it took for user to land on the page and then click the button.
Simo