One of the sites I am working on is using Google Ads, but it needs to open the ad’s location in a new window – a different target. I looked around, and couldn’t find any documentation on which variable you can set to set the target (mostly just Google searches).

Of course, I am assuming there is a variable. If you’ve used Google ads before, you know there are variables you can set to get different behavior out of the ads. You can set the ad height (google_ad_height), text color (google_color_text), etc.

Since I couldn’t find anything online that lists the things one can set, I decided to grep Google’s javascript file to see if anything looked like a reasonable setting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that looked like it would do the trick, but I thought you might find it interesting to see what you can (potentially) set. (If you know how to change the ad target I’d love to hear).

This was a shotgun search, so some of these might not be set-able, but some are interesting – ‘google_cust_interests’ hum… To get this list, by the way, I just did:

$ grep -o 'google_[a-zA-Z0-9]*_[a-zA-Z0-9]*' show_ad.js | sort | uniq

List of possible Google Ads variables:

• google_ad_channel
• google_ad_client
• google_ad_format
• google_ad_frameborder
• google_ad_height
• google_ad_host
• google_ad_output
• google_ad_override
• google_ad_region
• google_ad_request
• google_ad_section
• google_ad_slot
• google_ad_type
• google_ad_url
• google_ad_width
• google_ads_div
• google_ads_frame
• google_ads_iframe
• google_adslot_loaded
• google_alternate_ad
• google_alternate_color
• google_color_bg
• google_color_border
• google_color_line
• google_color_link
• google_color_text
• google_color_url
• google_cpa_choice
• google_cpa_region
• google_cust_age
• google_cust_ch
• google_cust_gender
• google_cust_id
• google_cust_interests
• google_cust_job
• google_cust_l
• google_cust_lh
• google_cust_u
• google_flash_version
• google_image_size
• google_kw_type
• google_last_modified
• google_max_num
• google_max_radlink
• google_num_0ad
• google_num_ad
• google_num_radlinks
• google_num_slot
• google_num_slots
• google_org_error
• google_page_location
• google_page_url
• google_prev_ad
• google_radlink_request
• google_referrer_url
• google_reuse_colors
• google_rl_filtering
• google_rl_mode
• google_ui_features

Update: It seems it’s against Google Ads policy to open the ads in new windows.