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I would recommend getting the link from their root domain(s) to the service hosted on your own domain as that wold most likely be more valuable.  This would do a few things. Referral visits. You could see pretty quickly how many people are coming from the university site to your site using the link. Endorsement strength. By having the link and university's explanation of your service on their site, they're providing additional trust based on people's past interactions with the university. This is partially an SEO thing, but also a conversion factor, i.e., "I trust my Uni's opinion so this is probably a worthwhile service." Simpler. You'll be managing fewer domains (just you're own) and won't have to worry about technical changes on the uni's side regarding the redirection and subdomain. There's all that, plust the newly created subdomain wouldn't carry nearly as much trust and authority as the root domain. It's why Wordpress.org doesn't get in trouble in Google if someone creates: reallyspammysite.wordpress.org.  Hope that clears it up. If someone else has compelling reasons for the other method, I'll let them expand on it.

Hi, Dom, maybe you find something here: http://moz.com/community/q/does-anyone-know-of-any-tools-that-can-help-split-up-xml-sitemap-to-make-it-more-efficient-and-better-for-seo Splitting a sitemap can be useful for you to keep sight over the indexed url's.  But it's quit normal to run a sitemap with 5000 url's. the maximum is 50.000 url's for 1 sitemap, so it's not necessary. Grtz, Leonie

Using the campaign url's to track all traffic in analytics from the alternate domain. The issue being is when people search for {domain} rather than put in {domain}.com nothing comes up. I think there's an issue with how the 301 is being served. It serves up a 301 immediately rather than letting google seeing the page, a tracking pixel, and then serving a redirect.

Hi Dom, Here is my opinion for your query: You can have 2 separate landing pages for your organic & paid visitors (visitors from your paid marketing efforts like AdWords). For your paid marketing, you should create a page where you can accommodate both important aspects- Content & Functionality on the same page. Content is equally important even if you are using landing page for paid ads. A perfect combination of both can give you better quality score, higher rank at low cost & more conversions. Here, I am not suggesting you to write big paragraph on your landing page but you can just highlight very important aspects which can compel the visitors to take action. I would advice you to write little content with catchy headlines along with functionality. A modification in page layout should work here. For your organic visitors, you can make your landing pages content-centric to make it more informative from search engines & users point of view and then can lead them to the main functionality page via creating a button as suggested by OlegKorneitchouk. Content will help SEs to find you and help visitors to understand more about your services and then take necessary action. Please avoid to push "Call to Action" below the page as many a times visitors don't want to read too many content and they can leave the site without taking any action. One more suggestion: I noticed that you have provides Login button on the top right on http://www.rentcollegepads.com/marquette/search. I would suggest you to make it Sigh In Button coz there are chances when visitors not member of your site already. Hope this will help.