difficulties with datetick and subplot dimensions

I have several time series that I am trying to analyse and I am plotting all the series in different subplots and scatter plots. The date vector I have is in Julian dates, and I am having some problems in visualising the dates without it affecting the figure quality. Consider the following:

dat = 1-(20-1).*rand(365,8);
dat2 = 1-(20-1).*rand(365,8);
time = datenum('2009-01-01'):datenum('2009-12-31');

dtt = {'keepticks'};

for i = 1:8;
    for ii = 1:2;
        figure(ii);
        ax = subplot(4,2,i);
        plot(time,dat(:,i),'k');
        hold on;
        plot(time,dat2(:,i),'r');
        if ii == 1;
            datetick('x','mmm','keepticks');
        else
            datetick('x','mmm');
        end
        AX = get(ax,'position');
        AX(3) = AX(3)./2;
        set(ax,'position',AX);

          axes('position',[AX(1)+AX(3) AX(2) AX(3) AX(4)]);
          scatter(dat(:,i),dat2(:,i));
      end
  end

As you see, the difference between figure 1 and figure 2 is that in one I have specified to 'keepticks' (which is what I would like to do), but the two final plot dimensions vary, the format of the plots should be like figure 2. Why is this happening? How could I use keepticks but also have the subplots to maintain their dimensions?