An alert is the moment a viewer gets something back for supporting you. It is a small thing that runs for three seconds, and it is also the single most-shared part of a stream, because it is what shows up in clips. Worth getting right.
What an alert actually is
An alert is a web page that sits invisibly in your scene and wakes up when something happens on your channel. Someone follows, the page plays an animation, then goes quiet again. That is why alerts install through a service like StreamElements: something has to be listening to your channel to know a follow happened.
Setting them up
- Open the install link that came with your alert pack. The alerts are added to your free StreamElements account in one click.
- In StreamElements, open the overlay and copy the overlay URL.
- In OBS or Streamlabs, add a Browser Source and paste the URL. Set the width and height to your canvas size — 1920 and 1080 for a standard Full HD stream, not the 800 x 600 OBS starts with.
- Drag the alert source to the top of your Sources list so alerts draw in front of everything else.
Which events to enable
A complete alert pack covers six events. Turn on the ones that apply to your channel:
- Follow — the most frequent. Keep it short.
- Subscriber — bigger moment, can be longer and louder.
- Gifted sub — often arrives in bursts of ten or more, so make sure yours does not queue up ten full-length animations back to back.
- Donation / tip — usually the longest, since it often carries a message.
- Cheer / bits — Twitch-specific.
- Raid — the one that matters most, because a room full of strangers is watching it.
If you are not an Affiliate yet, subs and bits will not fire. That is normal — set them up anyway so they work the day you get there.
The settings people get wrong
Duration. A follow alert that runs eight seconds feels endless when three arrive in a row. Three to five seconds is plenty for a follow. Save the long version for tips and raids.
Volume. Alert sounds are almost always too loud relative to game audio, because you set them while nothing else is playing. Set them with your game running.
Message length. If your alert shows a donation message, cap it. Someone will paste a wall of text into it eventually.
Alert queue. When ten gifted subs land at once, you want them to combine or queue briefly, not to overlap into noise.
Test before you go live
StreamElements has a test button for every alert type. Fire each one and watch it land in OBS — with your game audio running, so you hear the real balance. Two minutes here saves you discovering that your raid alert is silent in front of a raiding channel.
A note on matching
Alerts sitting on a stream whose overlay came from somewhere else is the most common reason a setup looks unfinished. If your overlay is from one theme, take the alerts from the same one.