The trend toward combining search and social campaigns led Marin Software to launch the next generation of its cross-channel advertising platform to help brands like Nordstrom Rack better integrate and manage many types of media across campaigns. The platform lets marketers bring together all campaigns across publishers.

That wasn’t always the case, says Wes MacLaggan, senior vice president of Marketing at Marin Software.

A few years ago, Marin company execs recognized a trend that Facebook would dominate social and Google would dominate search, and getting the two publishers aligned would become a key part of how marketers would reach consumers.

Silos existed in the previous version of Marin’s platform, but social and search were a little more “broken apart then we would have liked,” he said. “You would kind of need to put the data together.”

Marin’s State of Digital Advertising Report, a survey of more than 500 global marketers, released earlier this week found about 48% of marketers cite the integration of search and social channels as their biggest challenge for 2018. Despite the complications, the study recognizes search and social as the fastest-growing channels. The vast majority of advertisers expect to increase the amount they spend in 2018, but investments in social will lead by 70%, followed by search at 65%.

Many marketers also don’t believe they have the expertise to create cross-channel campaigns, which is one of the reasons why Marin software created MarinOne. Part of the process required the company to work with Facebook to analyze and combine impression-level data with searches to see how social activity influences search.

MacLaggan said now the platform now brings in data on customer segments and lifetime value, product and inventory feeds, marketing schedules and more.

There are too many lost opportunities to follow the consumer from Instagram, Facebook and search, MacLaggan said.