The 'Email, apps, IM' referrer category represents all sessions where the visitor navigated to their current article page from another unknown page or mobile app where no referrer data is made available to the analytics trackers in your site like Google, Adobe, and Chartbeat. This category can also be thought of as "dark social" or "direct social" traffic; visitors who arrived via emails, apps, IMs, or other platforms and webpages that do not permit the transfer of referrer data to your site.
We do not categorize this traffic as Direct traffic like Google Analytics does because we think it's useful to separately categorize these two very different visitor behaviors: (1 / Direct) visitors who navigate directly to your homepage or other landing pages are typically using a bookmark or typing your domain name into the browser's URL bar, versus (2 / Direct-Social) visitors that are directly referred via a link from some unknown platform or website that does not permit the transfer of referrer data in the network request to your site.
If your team uses UTM codes to track clicks to your site from various promotion channels like email newsletters to your subscribers, you can use our UTM tracking capabilities to view these traffic insights in our Real-time Dashboard and Advanced Queries.