Facebook announced that it is about to begin rolling out improved “Core Audiences” targeting options, which are built into all of its ad buying interfaces. These will allow advertisers to target “precise audiences” based on location, demographic, interests and behaviors.

“Say you’re a retailer that wants to show ads to people that live near your brick-and-mortar locations,” Facebook explains in a blog post. “With flexible location targeting, you can build campaigns around any combination of geographies: country and city (France and London), country and state (Canada and New York), state and city (California and Las Vegas), state and ZIP code (US only), etc. It’s also easier to exclude certain areas — i.e., New York City, except 11211, or the UK, excluding Cambridge.”

Remember those stories from earlier this week about Facebook knowing when you’re about to start a relationship, and when you fall in love?

Facebook is also encouraging advertisers to target people who have recently declared their love on the social network. Core Audiences now features additional values for relationship status, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships, and timely changes in life events, such as getting engaged or married. It will also now let you target people that have gotten engaged or married in the past year or the last three or six months.

Core Audiences also now includes workplace and job title information, as well as expanded education information.

“We know that people have a ton of interests, and that marketers want to reach people specifically based on them,” Facebook says. “So we simplified how you can do this on Facebook by redefining our interest-based targeting segments so each has one simple meaning. Rather than having multiple targeting options like broad categories and keywords, we developed a new methodology that increases the precision of interest-based targeting by allowing advertisers to simply choose one segment. Now, if you want to reach baseball fans, just choose “baseball” as your targeting segment — it’ll pull in all the people that have liked or expressed interest in baseball-related topics on Facebook.”

Finally, Core Audiences is getting a new targeting option in behaviors, which includes Partner Categories. This enables marketers to target users based on things they purchase and the devices they use.

Additionally, in the U.S., Facebook is adding Partner Categories to the Ads Create Tool. These were previously only available in the Power Editor.

Image via Facebook