How To Setup Twitch Alerts

Setting up Twitch Alerts

It can be tough to monitor your Twitch Channels activity while you are streaming and if you are not paying attention you can easily miss a new follower or subscriber. Missing a new follower can be a big deal when your channel is just starting out, you need all the help you can get. Luckily you can setup Twitch Alerts that notify you every time a user follows, subscribes, donates, or hosts your stream. These Alerts will trigger an audible notification and can also appear on your stream for your viewers to see too.

Create a Streamlabs Account

The first thing you need to do is log into Stream Labs. You can use your Twitch, Youtube, Mixer, Facebook, Periscope, or Picarto account. Since we are streaming to Twitch, lets use that account for now. Head on over to www.streamlabs.com and click on the “Login to get started” button. Then click on the “Login with Twitch” button, if you are logged into twitch it will sync up with your account and bring you to the Streamlabs dashboard.

Head to the “Widget” section on the left side menu and click on the “Alert Box” Link to open the Alert Box settings. This is where we will setup alerts for new followers, subscribers, donations, bits, hosts, and even raids. Each one can be customized with their own alert style.

Displaying Alerts in OBS

The first thing we need to do is link streamlabs alerts to your OBS using a “Browser Source” source. Inside the Alert Box section of Streamlabs copy the Widget URL by clicking the “Copy” button, then open up OBS.

Then, open up your OBS and add a new source by clicking on the plus icon and selecting the “Browser Source” option. Name the source whatever you like and click on the “OK” button. Paste the copied URL into the URL field and click on the “OK” button to update the source. That’s it, your Twitch Alerts are now linked to that OBS scene and will now display so lets test it out.

Testing Your Alerts

To test your alerts, head to the Stream Labs page and click on the “Test Follower” button (You may have to adjust/move the newly created alert source to appear in the location you would like it to be). The alert should pop up on your OBS preview.

Editing Stream Alerts

Now that your alerts are linked to your OBS scene we can adjust the image and text settings for each of the alert options.

Media Sharing

Media Sharing allows donors to share images, videos, or audio files with your stream when donating to your channel. This is disabled by default and if you choose to enable it I recommend having a mod review the media files that each donor shares since the content will be shown on your stream.

General Settings

The general settings will apply to all of the notification alerts, here you can set an alert delay that can be used if you want to monitor your alerts before they appear on stream. If you experience toxic donors or spammers, increase the “Alert Delay” slider and set it to the amount of time you need to monitor the alerts.

If you want full control you can enable the “Unlimited Alert Moderation Delay” option. This option will require manual approval on every alert notification before displaying them on stream. You can also adjust your alert’s default layout here, there are 3 layout options:

Image with the text underneath
Image behind the overlayed text
Image to the right of the text

Specific Alert Settings

Each of the 6 alert options have their own tab where you can customize the look and feel individually. All of the alerts are enabled by default but have the option of being disabled. You may want to disable the follower alert as your channel grows and viewers are following often.

Alert Animations

The “Alert Animation” option sets the incoming and outgoing animations, there are 23 different animation styles to choose from. You can use these to add some extra flavor to your layovers. Some streamers will use the slide up/down animation to make their alerts slide up from their webcam or other layovers they have on the screen.

Message Template

This is where you will set the message that appears when users follow your channel. If you enter “{name}” that piece of text will be replaced with the users twitch name, the default follower message is set to “{name} is now following!”. If the twitch user “UpgrowthDevelopment” follows your channel the following message will appear “UpgrowthDevelopment is now following!”.

You can also use “{amount}” in the Message Template of your Donation and Bit alerts to display the amount donated.

And “{count}” will display the number of viewers during a Host or Raid Alert.

Text Animation

The text animation option adds some animation to the text that appears in the alert. There are currently 7 animations to choose from, selecting an option will display a little demo of what the text will look like.

Image

This option has the biggest impact on the alert notification, this is the image or gif that appears when a user follows your channel. Click on the “Change Media” button to browse from Streamlabs collection of stock gifs and images or upload your own file.

Sound

With each alert, a sound also plays. Once again, you can select a sound from the Stream Labs stock files or upload your own audio file to use. Clicking on the audio files will trigger a preview so that you can hear what your alert will sound like.

The Sound Volume slider below allows you to adjust the volume the sound plays at. You may want to increase this to ensure you do not miss any alerts.

Alert Delay

Each alert has its own slider for both the alert animation and alert text. Depending on the image/gif and alert animation you might want a delay on your alert text so it does not appear too early.

The alert text delay will only effect the text, so the image will display and then the text will display after the set delay time.

Font Settings

Here you can adjust the font that the displays on each of the alerts. Stream Labs uses google fonts as the fonts you can choose from. The Font Size slider adjusts the size of the font from 12px to 80px.

Font Weight

The font weight setting effects how bold the alert font will display. You can choose between 100 (thinnest) and 900 (thickest).

Text Color

The “Text Color” option adjusts the color of the message template font. The “Highlight Color” option adjusts the color of the special bracketed text that you put in the message (“{name}”, “{amount}”, and “{count}”).

Alert Variations

If you do not want the same alert message or image to display for every viewer that follows your channel, the “Alert Variations” section allows you to add multiple different versions of each of the alerts.

Click on the “Add Variation” button to create additional alerts. A popup will appear where you can set a name and frequency for the new variation along with all of the same alert options as before.

Don't forget to save your settings after making any alert changes.

You should be good to go! Your alerts are now synced to your OBS and should appear on stream whenever you get a new follower, subscriber, donation, or host. The only thing left to do is find the perfect images and audio files for your stream. Don’t be afraid to get creative, these alerts are a great way to customize the look and feel of your channel. There are plenty of different images and gifs out there for you to use and you can always create your own in Photoshop. Once you have perfected your alerts make sure to click on the “Save Settings” button on the bottom then sit back and wait for those sweet sweet alerts to popup!

Now that you have some awesome alerts set up its time to focus on Growing you Twitch Channel! Take a look at our last blog post to start growing your community and increasing your followers!

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