How do you reach the right audience with Meta Ads today?

I’ve been noticing something strange with my Meta Ads campaigns.

When my CPM is within the expected range, I usually get the right audience and good-quality leads. But whenever the CPM drops, I start getting a lot of autofills, and most of those leads turn out to be junk.

The difficult part is figuring out whether the problem is with the audience setup or the creative. I haven’t found a reliable way to tell which one is causing the issue.

Broad campaigns are working really well for me. The problem is that broad campaigns seem to take signals from my audience-based campaigns, so I can’t keep adding multiple broad campaigns for the same instant form.

Has anyone dealt with something similar? How are you identifying whether Meta is reaching the wrong audience or whether the creative is attracting low-quality leads?

One important limitation: I don’t have a CRM, so I can’t send quality lead data back to Meta as a signal.