If yours is giving you one time for the day, it's likely telling you when the moon is overhead. Most of the moon prediction calculators give you the times when the moon is overhead, rising, setting and underfoot. But one of the key variables is the positioning of the sun, meaning if one of those moon postions coincides with the sun rising or setting, then movement is greater. The moon phase also plays a role, whether it's one of the two quarters, full or new.
One thing to keep in mind is the moon and sun are static variables, but weather is dynamic and big changes can cause increases or decreases in movement.
Here are my observations when just taking the moon into consideration. The days leading up to a full moon, when the moon is straight up in the afternoon/evening, I tend to see deer feeding in the afternoon and many times are feeding out in fields. During the full moon and a few days after, evening and morning activity is minimal, but will get some pictures of deer on trail cameras late morning or midday. Several days after a full moon I see an increase in movement during the mornings. Then during a new moon, when it's up in the sky in the afternoonm, the mornings and evenings both tend to be pretty good since the rising and setting of the moon coincides with the rising and setting of the sun.
I don't use the moon to tell me when to hunt, accept a full moon, but I use it helping me to decide which stands to use. When afternoon/evening hunts are better I like to hunt field edges, but when mornings are better I like to hunt stands back in the timber as deer are coming off the fields. Some stands are good for both mornings and evenings, then my decision is based on wind direction and the ability to enter and exit the stand with the least disturbance.
Add the rut, then you can pretty much throw out moon calculators. Bucks don't care what the moon is doing, but it can effect when the does are on their feet and feedin. But it's common the does are avoiding some of the main food sources as well. Many people will say you can't predict movement based on the moon alone, and I agree with that, but it does play a factor. This is why you see many fields barren during the night of a full moon, to them it must seem like daylight when the moon is bright enough for us to see.
I have one of the Caio watches that tells me those 4 moon positions each day, and whenever I see multiple deer in fields at a strange time of the day, it's generally during one of those times when the weather has been relatively stable for several days.
Tbunao's Link
I think there are a LOT of factors that influence deer movement - weather, wind strength and direction, barometric pressure, moon phase, time of the year, and on and on. This app at least tries to use an algorithm that combines as many of these things as possible instead of just relying on one of them. It uses a 5-star rating and I have to say that on both of the 4-star dates/times that I have hunted I have seen bucks. That is WAY too small a sample size, I know, but it's better than being 0 for 2!...
-Drew
