As a dungeon master in the early 80s I made my campaigns/ scenarios very flexible. A common mistake in the beginning is to make things "too rigid." When I designed a scenario I didn't flesh out every single detail which meant I had to improvise a lot. I really liked to preserve the feeling of total freedom for the players - even if they wandered completely off the intended direction.
My campaigns were more plot-driven than most. I think just exploring and killing gets really dull.
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* The campaign was missing too many details.
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That's OK. You can't prepare for every single possibility in advance - especially if your players like to roam off the beaten track. Just be willing to improvise. Have some general guidelines.
Take it easy. The first time is always sloppy. But you'll learn.
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* I didn't have a firm enough grasp of the rules/system.
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OK. This one IS a big deal. But it's really tough to know ALL the rules your first time around. Still debate about rules is not uncommon.
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* Players became distracted--they joked around, and easily became unfocussed.
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IMO a dungeon master that's too rigid isn't much fun for anyone. You have to let people be themselves and not feel boxed in your grand plan. Joking around is a really big part of the fun. Don't take things so seriously. Honestly, when we played D&D (or Dragon Quest or Traveller or Aftermath ... etc) players would commonly wander into town to the brothels and pubs. (we were teens - so I would describe what the hot half-elf hooker NPC was wearing and play out the dialogue - even though it had nothing to do with the basic "plot").
It left a challenge to me to integrate plot elements whenever possible.
Sometimes a player would even kill an important NPC - I had to let it happen and reconfigure events entirely (yeah - sometimes I had to take a break just to figure stuff out). In the end IMO it was all about the experience of playing.
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* Unsure of what to do regarding players who couldn't make it to a session, which, as adults, happens often enough.
* Overall, the players may not have been invested enough in the campaign.
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Don't forget it's all about having fun. We were teenagers when we were playing. Role-play meant my friends played as bullies, buffoons, thieves, heroes, scumbags, lechers ... When done correctly it's an adventure for both the players and the dungeon master.
Simple hack&slash or gold-gathering or rigid plots are just plain boring. Improvise, joke around and don't take the game too seriously. I let the players do whatever they wanted. If you try to push your players in a particular direction then they will resist by doing something crazy in a game.
Here's an example of a plot that went waaay off course:
One time we were playing Top Secret (I think) where the players were recruited by some syndicate to gather info on some guy. Suddenly one of the players just decides to shoot the guy with a silenced pistol for the heck of it. That normally would have killed the plot right there (which is what he was trying to do).
But then I just thought about the natural consequences of his actions and improvised the events that followed. By the end every player had a "hit" out on them from the syndicate that tried to hire them in the first place. The other players teamed up on that one player who sabotaged them and killed him offering his head to the syndicate.
I trashed the original plot and salvage elements of it for a future scenario. But it was fun.