Are advertisers mis-targeting?

Why am I seeing foreign ads in Australia?

[anallawalla]

I usually see .com.au sites in Adsense from Australia and the occasional international business deliberately taegeting AU.

A new problem has been noted mainly on publisher sites, including MSN's MyLocal but also on Google Local. I tried searching for pizza in my suburb but G Local is not available for AU yet, so it showed some ads to the left of the US map. I saw an ad for a US-only pizza chain.

At other times I am seeing AdWords in Polish, Japanese, Swedish, Dutch. I usually submit feedback via the Ads by Google link. Are lots of advertisers suddenly adding Australia to their list of countries, given that AdWords do not default to the whole world when creating a campaign? Or is this a Google error that advertisers need to worry about?

[engine]

I've seen folks set up their campaigns with global targeting quite often.

Another reason is that they may be wanting to win more clicks to boost the ad performance.

[Green_Grass]

or maybe they are just plain dumb.

or very intelligent MFA's?