Another bit of must-see-internet-tv. In this one Avinash Kaushik, who is one deep thinker when it comes to Web Analytics, presents his ideas of how analytics should be used and what they can and should provide to web marketers and companies doing business online.

This is not a review of charts and graphs and statistics. It’s as relevant to any online marketer or business manager as it is a challenge to any web analyst. This is forward and aggressive thinking that is ultimately less about web analytics as its now generally practiced and perceived and more about taking the core of how analytics should be practiced and incorporating it into an integrated approach to doing business online.

In fact, not long after it begins Avinash proclaims web analytics as dead. And then he builds a case for its replacement, something he calls Web Insights which attempts to focus on actionable information as opposed to interesting data. He goes on to describe how he executes against this goal at Intuit (where he is Senior Manager for Research and Analytics) and share some very impressive examples.

It will be interesting to see which, if any, of the current crop of analytics vendors can take the challenge Avinash suggests and connect their data (and charts and tables) to a broader set of fundamental business issues. Right now they all seem justifiably buried in wish-lists for more powerful tools on the analytics side, and it’s hard to see anyone really moving towards insight (not that they don’t all already love that word).