Our research is very clear on this point: Mobile marketing budgets are being wasted, and most of the money is being spent on user acquisition.

That’s because mobile marketing is still difficult for many, and getting new users is seen as more important than retention, advocacy, or customer service.

Today, App Samurai has launched its mobile, self-service advertising tool to help solve this problem for businesses of all sizes. And it has an interesting trick up its sleeve — cost per install (CPI) optimization.

CPI, you say? Isn’t that the acquisition method that produces high volumes of low-quality users? Well, under normal circumstances, yes. Our research at VB Insight clearly shows that CPI is not always the optimal approach for acquiring high-quality users. However, it is attractive for early-stage businesses because it makes it easy to track return versus spend.

So why does App Samurai focus on CPI, and what does its technology do to make things better for app marketers while keeping the benefits of CPI?

“Our payout model is CPI but we have built an ongoing optimization engine to deliver the most engaged and high-quality users according to their post-install events, such as level achievement, purchase, and registration,” Emre Fadillioglu, CEO at App Samurai, told VentureBeat. “In order to enable that function, our advertisers just need to track those events on their tracking provider.”

And App Samurai supports most of the leading trackers, which means most app marketers, advertisers, and developers can use it.

Thanks to App Samurai’s integrations with major tracking providers (TUNE, Kochava, Adjust, and more), events pass automatically to App Samurai, and the system optimizes the sub-publishers accordingly,” Fadillioglu said. “As you mentioned, while keeping the benefits of CPI, we enable users to drive more engaged users to their apps.”

In addition to optimizing for quality via CPI, App Samurai provides additional benefits, such as fraud prevention, click spam detection, virtual device detection, and VPN protection. In a world where mobile advertising is under increased scrutiny — a recent report showed that eight networks are 100 percent fraudulent — these additions are welcome.

The solution also provides a recommendation engine that offers recommendations for targeted countries and stores, daily install estimations, and automated sub-publisher optimization according to customer KPIs.

Founded by five entrepreneurs, App Samurai is one of the eight companies to join the 2017 Class at Techstars Berlin. And the company isn’t stopping at CPI optimization.

“Our product development plan includes new features that focus on cost per action (CPA) and cost per engagement (CPE) campaigns,” Fadillioglu said. “Currently, we are testing further optimizations to deliver users who complete in-app actions such as registration for shopping apps and tutorial completions for gaming apps.”

The solution offers three ad options: Video Campaigns, Acquisition Campaigns, and Boost Campaigns. It is free to sign up for App Samurai, and the tool doesn’t start charging unless you create a mobile campaign. You only pay as you get installs, and there is no monthly payment or subscription fee, but the minimum budget to create an ad campaign is $100.

App Samurai is available from today via the company’s website.